The Rudolf Steiner Archive

We have been considering the emergence of a search for knowledge with inadequate means, and this has opened up wide historical perspectives. Now with regard to these matters, and also to what I said with the same intention when I last spoke here, I must ask you to realise that we are concerned not with a theory or with a system of ideas but with the communication of facts. That is the point to keep in mind; otherwise these matters will not be clearly understood. I am not setting out historical laws or ideas, but stating facts—facts that are connected with the plans and purposes both of certain personalities who are held together in brotherhoods and of other beings who work on these brotherhoods and whose influence is also sought. They are beings who are not incarnated in the flesh, but are embodied in the spiritual world. It is essential to keep this in mind when you hear what I told you yesterday. For where these brotherhoods are concerned, we have to do with various parties (as indeed you will have learnt from explanations given in earlier lectures, e.g. The Occult Movement in the 19th Century (See p. 71)). Thus there is one party which stands for keeping certain higher truths absolutely secret; and again, allowing for various shades of opinion, there are brothers, particularly since the middle of the fifteenth century, who hold that certain truths, if only those called for by the needs of the moment, should be carefully and pertinently disclosed. Besides these two main parties there are other variations; hence you will see that whatever influence is finally exerted on human evolution from the side of these brotherhoods will very often reflect some kind of compromise.

Early in the 1840s, those brotherhoods who have knowledge of the spiritual impulses that play into history saw coming on that battle of certain spiritual beings with higher Spirits which terminated in 1879, when certain Angel-beings, Spirits of Darkness, were cast down, an event symbolised by the victory of Michael over the dragon. When therefore, in the middle of the nineteenth century, these brotherhoods felt that this event was approaching, they had to decide what attitude to take towards it and to consider what should be done.

Those brothers who wished above all to reckon with the demands of the moment were actuated up to a certain point with the best intentions, but they were mistaken in their approach to the materialism of the time; they thought that men who were prepared to accept only what could be known in physical terms should be offered something from the spiritual world in a materialistic form. So it was with good intentions that Spiritualism was launched on the world in the 1840s.

Since at that time a critical mentality, concerned solely with the external world, was due to prevail on earth, it was necessary to give people at least some inkling, some feeling, that a spiritual world existed around them. And so now this compromise, as is the way with compromises, was put into effect. Those brothers who were altogether against communicating spiritual truths to mankind found themselves outvoted, one might say; they had to give in and agree. Even so, it was not their original intention to introduce the phenomena connected with Spiritualism into the world. Where collective groups of people are concerned one always gets compromises, and naturally, when a collective decision has been reached, not only those who favoured it will be looking for results, but those who at first opposed it will be expecting something or other from it.

Thus the well-meaning members of these brotherhoods took the mistaken view that through the use of mediums people would be convinced of the presence around them of a spiritual world; then on the basis of this conviction it would be possible to impart higher truths. This could indeed have happened if the phenomena that came through the mediums had in fact been interpreted in the intended way, as evidence for the presence of an interpenetrating spiritual world. But—as I explained yesterday—something quite different resulted. The mediumistic phenomena were interpreted by those who took part in the seances as coming from the dead. Hence the experiment was a disappointment for all concerned. Those brothers who had allowed themselves to be outvoted were very grieved that the séance manifestations could be spoken of—sometimes correctly—as coming from the spirits of the dead. The well-intentioned progressive brothers had not expected any mention of the dead, but rather of a general elemental world, so they too were disappointed.

These activities, however, are pursued above all by persons who have been in some way initiated. And besides the brotherhoods already mentioned, we have to reckon with others, or with sections of the same brotherhoods, wherein a minority of members, or even a majority, consists of initiates who within their brotherhoods are known as “brothers of the left;” they are those who treat every impulse that enters into human evolution as a question of power. Naturally, these brothers expected all sorts of things from Spiritualism.

As I told you yesterday, it was these brothers of the left who were specially responsible for dealing in the way I described with the souls of the dead. Their interest was centred on observing what came out of the seances, and by degrees they got control of the whole field. The well-intentioned initiates gradually lost all interest in Spiritualism; they felt in a certain sense ashamed, because those who had all along opposed Spiritualism said they might have known from the start that nothing would come of it. But the result was that Spiritualism came under the power of the brothers of the left. Yesterday I said that these brothers had been disappointed in the following way. They saw that Spiritualism could bring to light what they had set on foot, and they were above all anxious that this should not happen. Since the persons attending the seances believed they were in touch with the dead, communications from the dead might reveal what the brothers of the left were doing with the souls of the dead. The very souls which they were misusing might manifest in the course of a séance.

You must please once more keep in mind that I am not expounding theories but relating facts—facts that go back to particular individuals. And when individuals are united in brotherhoods, they will differ in what they expect from the same event. When one speaks of facts that belong to the spiritual world, it is always a question of looking for the outcome of individual impulses. In ordinary life one action will often contradict another. If theories are discussed, the rule of contradiction must be observed. But when one is speaking of facts, then—just because they are facts—we shall very often find that facts in the spiritual world agree just as little as do human actions on the physical plane. Therefore I ask you to keep this in mind. One cannot talk of realities in these matters unless one talks of individual facts. That is the point. Therefore we must keep the various streams apart and distinguish between them.

This is connected with something very important, which must be kept clearly in view by anyone who hopes to arrive at a more or less satisfying outlook on the world. It is a fundamental point, and we must bring it before us, even though it is somewhat abstract.

A person who tries to build up a world-picture rightly endeavours to bring its separate elements into harmony. He does this from habit—a thoroughly justified habit, connected for many centuries with the dearest possession of our souls: with monotheism. He tries therefore to lead back the whole range of his experience of the world to a unitary principle. This is valid enough in its own way—not, however, in the sense in which it is usually applied, but in quite another sense of which we will speak next time. To-day I will deal only with the essential principle.

If we approach the world with the preconceived idea that everything must be explicable without contradiction, as though it came from a single source, we shall be disappointed again and again when we look without prejudice at the world and the experiences it affords. We have acquired the habit of treating everything we perceive in the light of the didactic concept which says that everything leads back to a unitary divine origin—everything derives from God and so must admit of a single mode of explanation.

But this is not so. The experiences we encounter in the world do not spring from a single ground, but from diverse spiritual individualities, who all play a part in producing them. That is the essential point. We will speak tomorrow of the sense in which monotheism is justified. Up to a certain stage, and indeed up to a high stage, we must think of independent individualities as soon as we cross the threshold of the spiritual world. And then we cannot expect to explain everything we experience in unitary terms. Take any series of events—let us say the experiences encountered from 1913 to 1918. A diagram will naturally show them taking their course from two directions at once ...

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An historian will always try to reduce the whole process to the working of a single principle, but that is not how things happen. Directly we cross the threshold of the spiritual world, whether downwards or upwards—it is one and the same—we find that different individualities, relatively independent of each other, are working into these events. We shall never understand the course of events if we assume a single source for them; we shall see them rightly only if in the turbulence of events we reckon with the activities of individualities who are working either with or against each other.

This is something that belongs to the deepest secrets of human evolution. For centuries, even for millennia, it has been obscured by monotheistic feeling, but you must take it into account. If to-day we are to come closer to ultimate questions, we must above all not confuse logic with abstract freedom from contradictions. In a world where independent individualities are simultaneously at work, contradictions are bound to occur, and to expect them not to occur leads to an impoverishment of ideas; to ideas which cannot embrace the whole of reality. The only adequate ideas will be those that are able to grasp a world replete with contradictions, for that is the real world.

The realms of nature that lie around us come into being in a very remarkable way. In all that we call nature, the nature we approach through science on the one hand and through aesthetic perception on the other, various individualities are at work. But in the present phase of human evolution a wise Providence has ordained an arrangement which is a great blessing for mankind. We can lay hold of nature with ideas that assume a monistic dispensation, because sense-perception allows us normally to experience only as much of nature as is in accord with that principle. Behind the tapestry of nature there lies something different which is sustained from a quite other direction; but sense-perception shuts it out, admitting only as much of nature as can pass through its sieve. Everything contradictory is strained out, and nature is communicated to us in the guise of a monistic system. But directly we cross the threshold and bring the true facts to bear on the interpretation of nature—the facts concerning the elemental spirits or the influence of human souls, which can also act on nature—then we are no longer able to speak of a monistic system applicable to nature. Once again we see clearly that we have to do with the workings of individualities who may either oppose or reinforce one another.

In the elemental world we find earth-spirits, gnomes; water-spirits, undines; air-spirits, sylphs; fire-spirits, salamanders. They are all there, but they do not form a single united band. Each of the four kingdoms is in a certain sense independent; they do not work only in rank and file as a single system, but they oppose one another. Their purposes are, to begin with, entirely distinct; the outcome reflects the interactions of their purposes in the most varied ways. If we know what these purposes are, we can discern in a given phenomenon the working together, let us say, of fire-spirits and undines. But we must never suppose that behind them is a single authority which gives them definite orders. This way of thinking is widespread to-day; and philosophers such as, for example, Wilhelm Wundt (whom Fritz Mauthner described with some justice as “an authority by the grace of his publisher”—yet before the war he ranked as an authority almost everywhere)—these philosophers are out to force into a unity all the manifold life of the soul, its concepts, its feeling, its willing, because they say that the soul is a unity, and therefore all this must belong to a unitary system. But that is not so, and the strongly conflicting tendencies in human life, which psycho-analysis indeed brings out, would not occur if our conceptual life did not lead back beyond the threshold into regions where it is influenced by individualities quite different from those that influence our feeling and our willing.

Really it is strange! Here (drawing on blackboard) we have in the human being a conceptual life, a life of feeling and a life of willing—yet a systematiser such as Wundt cannot get away from the idea that all this must form a single system. In fact, the life of concepts leads into one world, the life of feeling into another world, and the life of willing into another again. The function of the human soul is precisely to bring together into a unity activities which in the pre-human world—and therefore in the still existing pre-human world—are threefold.

All these things must be taken into account as soon as we study the impulses which have played into human evolution. I have already said that each post-Atlantean epoch has a special task, and I have described the task for mankind in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch as that of coming to terms with evil as an impulse in world-evolution. We have spoken of what this means from various points of view. The indispensable need is that the forces which manifest as evil when they appear in the wrong place shall be overcome by human endeavour during this epoch, so that men can begin to make out of these forces something favourable for the whole future of cosmic evolution. Hence the task of this fifth post-Atlantean epoch is quite specially arduous, and many temptations lie ahead. And as the powers of evil make their appearance in gradual stages, men are naturally much more inclined to give way to them in all realms instead of battling to place what appears as evil in the service of the rightful course of world-development. This, nevertheless, is what has to come about—up to a certain point evil must be turned to good ends. Failing that, we shall not be able to go forward into the sixth post-Atlantean epoch, which will have a quite different task. Its task will be to enable men, while still connected with the earth, to have the spiritual world continually in view and to live in accordance with spiritual impulses. It is precisely in connection with the task of opposing evil during our own epoch that a certain darkening of the human personality can occur.

We know that since 1879 the Spirits of Darkness who are nearest to man, belonging as they do to the realm of the Angels, have been roaming about in the human world, because they were cast down into it from the spiritual world. Hence they are present in human impulses and work through them. Just because these beings are able to work invisibly, so close to man, and by their influence to hinder him from recognising the spiritual with his reason—which is also a task for our epoch—so in this epoch there are many opportunities for surrendering to all sorts of errors and observations that belong to the darkness of evil. During this epoch man has to learn by degrees to grasp the spiritual with his reason; for this possibility has been offered to him by the vanquishing of the Spirits of Darkness in 1879, as a result of which more and more spiritual wisdom has been able to flow down from the spiritual worlds. Only if the Spirits of Darkness had remained up there in spiritual realms would they have been able to obstruct this flow. Henceforward they can do nothing to hinder it; but they can continue to create confusion and to darken human souls. We have already described in part the opportunities they have for doing this, and the precautions they have taken to prevent men from receiving spiritual wisdom.

All this, of course, gives no occasion for lamentation but for a strengthening of human energy and aspiration towards the spiritual. For if men achieve what can be achieved in this epoch by taking hold of the forces of evil and turning them to good ends, then they will at the same time achieve something tremendous: this fifth post-Atlantean epoch will gain for human evolution grander conceptions than those of any other post-Atlantean epoch, or indeed of any previous epoch. For example, the Christ appeared and passed through the Mystery of Golgotha during the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, but only in our fifth epoch will it be possible for human reason to encompass the meaning of this event. In the fourth epoch men could comprehend that in the Christ Impulse they had something which would carry their souls beyond death: this was made sufficiently clear through Pauline Christianity. The fifth epoch will bring an even more important development: men will come to recognise the Christ as their helper in the task of transforming the forces of evil into good. But connected with this characteristic of the fifth epoch is a fact we must inscribe daily in our souls and never forget, although we are readily inclined to forget it. In this epoch we have to be fighters for the spirit: we must realise that our forces grow slack unless they are kept constantly in training for the conquest of the spiritual world. In this fifth epoch man is in the highest degree dependent upon his freedom, and he has to experience it to the full. And the idea of human freedom should be the criterion of whatever he encounters in this epoch. For if human energies were to grow slack, everything might turn to evil. Man is no longer in a condition to be guided like a child. If the aim of certain brotherhoods is to treat him in this way, as he was in the third and fourth epochs, they are far from doing right and are not advancing human evolution. Anyone who in this epoch speaks of the spiritual world must constantly remind himself to do so in such a way that acceptance or rejection of it is left to the freedom of the individual. Therefore certain things can only be—said; but the saying is just as important as any other way of presenting them was in other epochs. I will give you an example.

In our time the communication of truths—or, if I may use a trivial phrase, lecturing on them—is the most important thing. People should then be left to a free choice of attitude. One should go no further than the lecture, the communication of truths; the rest should follow out of free decision, just as it does when someone takes a decision on the physical plane. This applies also to the things which can in a certain sense be directed and guided only from the spiritual world.

We shall understand one another better if we go into details. During the fourth post-Atlantean epoch it was still necessary to consider other things, not only the spoken word. What were these other things? Let us take a definite instance. The island of Ireland, to use its modern name, has quite special characteristics which distinguish it from the rest of the world. Every part of the earth has some distinguishing characteristics—there is nothing unusual in that—but the point here is that Ireland has them to an exceptional degree.

You know from my Occult Science that it is possible to look back and discern various influences which have flowed from the spiritual world into the evolution of the earth. You have heard also what things were like in the Lemurian Age and of the various evolutionary developments since then. Yesterday I called attention to the fact that the whole earth must be regarded as a living organism, and that the various influences which radiate out to the inhabitants of particular territories have a special effect on the “double,” also mentioned yesterday. In ancient times people who knew of Ireland gave expression to its peculiar characteristics in the form of myths and legends. One could indeed speak of an esoteric legend which indicated the nature of Ireland within the whole earth-organism. Lucifer, it was said, had once tempted mankind in Paradise, wherefore mankind was driven out and scattered over the earth, which was already in existence at that time. Thus a distinction was drawn—so the legend tells us—between Paradise, with Lucifer in it, and the rest of the earth. But with Ireland it was different. Ireland did not belong in the same sense to the rest of the earth, for Paradise, before Lucifer entered it, had created an image of itself on earth, and that image became Ireland.

Let us understand this clearly. Ireland is that piece of the earth which has no share in Lucifer, no connection with Lucifer. The part of Paradise that had to be separated, so that an earthly image of it might come into being, would have stood in the way of Lucifer's entry into Paradise. According to this legend, therefore, Ireland was conceived as having been first of all that part of Paradise which would have kept Lucifer out. Only when Ireland had been separated off, could Lucifer get in.

This legend, of which I have given you a very incomplete account, is a very beautiful one. For many people it explained the quite individual task of Ireland through the centuries. In the first of my Mystery Plays you will find what has been often described: how Europe was Christianised by Irish monks. After Patrick had introduced Christianity into Ireland, it came about that Christianity there led to the highest spiritual devotion. In further interpretation of the legend I have just described, Ireland—Ierne for the Greeks and Ivernia for the Romans—was even called the island of the saints, because of the piety that prevailed in the Christian monasteries there. This is connected with the fact that the forces which radiate from the earth and lay hold of the “double” are at their very best in the island of Ireland.

You will say: then the Irish should be the best of men. But that is not how things work out in the world! People immigrate into every region of the earth and have descendants, and so on. Human beings are thus not merely a product of the patch of earth where they live; their character may well contradict the influences that come from the earth. We must not attribute their development to the qualities found in a particular part of the earth-organism; that would be merely to succumb to illusions.

But we can say, more or less as I have said to-day, that Ireland is a quite special piece of land and this is one factor among many from which should come a fruitful working out of social-political ideas. Ireland is one such factor, and all these factors must be taken account of in conjunction with one another. In this way we must develop a science of human relationships on the earth. Until that is done, there will be no real health in the organisation of public affairs. That which can be communicated from out of the spiritual world must flow into any measures that are taken. For this reason I have said in public lectures that statesmen and others concerned with public affairs should acquaint themselves with these communications, for only then will they be able to control reality. But they do not do this, or at least they have not done it so far; yet the necessity for it remains.

This speaking, this communication, is the important thing to-day, in accordance with the tasks of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, for then, before speaking leads to actions, decisions have to be taken just as they are taken in relation to impulses on the physical plane. In earlier times it was different; other methods could then be employed.

At a particular time in the third post-Atlantean epoch a certain brotherhood took occasion to send a large number of colonists from Asia Minor to Ireland. These settlers came from the region where much later, in the fourth epoch, the philosopher Thales was born. It was from this same milieu and spiritual background that the initiates sent colonists to Ireland—why? Because they were aware of the special characteristics of a land such as Ireland, as indicated by the esoteric legend I have told you about. They knew that the forces which rise from the earth through the soil of Ireland act in such a way that people there are little influenced towards developing intellectuality, or the ego, or towards a capacity for taking decisions. The initiates who sent these colonists to Ireland knew this very well, and they chose people who appeared to be karmically suited to be exposed to such influences. In Ireland there still exist descendants of the old immigrants from Asia Minor who were intended to develop no trace of intellectuality, or of reasoning power or of decisiveness, but were on the other hand to manifest certain special qualities of temperament to an outstanding degree.

So, you see, preparations were made a very long time in advance for the peaceful interpretation of Christianity which eventually found scope in Ireland, and for the glorious developments which led to the Christianising of Europe. The fellow-countrymen of the later Thales sent to Ireland people who proved well suited to become those monks who could work in the way I have described. Such plans were often carried through in earlier times, and when in external history written by historians who lack understanding—though of course they may be intelligent enough, for intelligence to-day can be picked up in the street—you find accounts of ancient colonisations, you must be clear that a far-reaching wisdom lay behind them. They were guided and led in the light of what was to come about in the future, and the local characteristics of earth-evolution were always taken into account.

That was another way of introducing spiritual wisdom into the world. It should not be adopted to-day by anyone who is following the rightful path. To prescribe the movement of people against their will, in order to partition parts of the earth, would be wrong. The right way is to impart true facts and to leave people to decide their actions for themselves.

Hence you can see that there has been a real advance from the third and fourth post-Atlantean epochs up to the present; and this is something we must grasp quite clearly. We must recognise how this impulse for freedom must penetrate all the dominating tendencies of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. For it is precisely this freedom of the human mind that is opposed by that adversary of whom I have told you—the “double” who accompanies man from shortly before birth until death, though just before death he has to depart. If someone is under the influence which proceeds directly from the “double,” he may bring about all sorts of things which can appear in this epoch but are not in harmony with it. It will then not be possible for him to fulfil his task of fighting against evil in such a way that to a certain extent the evil is changed into good.

Just think of all that really lies behind the situation of humanity in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch! The detailed facts must be seen in their true colours, and understood. For wherever the “double” is strongly active, he will be working against mankind. In this fifth post-Atlantean epoch people have not reached the stage of being able to judge the facts correctly; particularly during these last three sad years they have not been at all inclined to form true judgments.

Take a fact which seems to be far removed from our immediate subject. In a large ironworks, 10,000 tons of cast iron were to be loaded into railway trucks. A definite number of workmen—75—were assigned to the job, and it appeared that each man could load 12½ tons a day.

There was a man named Taylor in whom the influence of the “double” prevailed over the needs of the human soul in our epoch. He first asked the managers if they did not think a man could load a good deal more than 12½ tons a day. They said that in their opinion a workman could load 18 tons a day at the utmost. Taylor then called for some experiments.

So, you see, Taylor proceeded to experiment with human beings! Machine standards were to be carried over into social life. Taylor wished to find out whether it was true, as the managers believed, that 18 tons a day was the utmost a man could load. He ordered rest-periods, calculated in physiological terms to be just long enough for a man to make good the energy he had previously expended. Naturally it turned out that the results varied with individuals. This does not matter with machines—you simply take the arithmetical mean—but it cannot properly be done with human beings, for each individual has his own justified capacity. All the same, Taylor did it—that is, he chose those workmen whose need for rest corresponded to the period he had calculated; the others were simply thrown out. The outcome was that the selected workmen, by dint of fully restoring their energies during the rest-periods, were each able to load 47½ tons a day.

Here we have the mechanics of the Darwinian theory applied to working life: the fit were kept on and the unfit discarded. The fit in this case were those who, with the aid of the given rest-periods, could load 47½ tons, instead of the 18 tons previously regarded as the maximum. In this way the workmen also could be satisfied, for such enormous economies were effected that wages could be raised by 60 per cent. Thus the chosen workmen, who had proved themselves fit in the struggle for existence, were very well pleased. But—the unfit could go hungry!

This is just the beginning of a far-reaching principle. Such things are little noticed, because they are not seen—as they must be seen—in the light of the great issues involved. So far we have not gone beyond the application of faulty scientific ideas to human life; but the underlying impulse remains. The next step will be to make similar use of the occult truths which will be disclosed in the course of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. Darwinism contains no occult truths, but its application to direct experiments on human beings would have horrible results. But if occult truths are brought in, as and when they become available, it will be possible to use them for obtaining enormous power over men—if only by a continual selection of the “fittest.” But things will not stop there. There would be an endeavour to use a certain occult discovery for making the fit ever fitter and fitter ... and by that means a tremendous power for utilising human beings—a power directly opposed to the good tendencies of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch—would be achieved.

I wished to give you these inter-related examples in order to show you how such far-ranging intentions begin, and how these matters must be illuminated from higher standpoints. Next time we will turn our attention to the three or four great truths which the fifth post-Atlantean epoch must arrive at, and how they could be misused if, instead of being brought into line with the rightful tendencies of the epoch, they were placed in the service of the “double,” represented by those brotherhoods who wish to set up another being in place of the Christ.

From the lectures that I have been privileged to give here over the course of many years, it will have become clear that the world view from which the content of these lectures was drawn is based on a very specific, one might say, attitude, or at least that at least one such attitude is associated with that world view, which can be more closely defined by saying: It is not possible to give a correct lecture within theosophy or spiritual science if the soul is not imbued with a certain tolerance towards every system of belief, an inner tolerance that can bring a devoted understanding to every kind of belief. For the actual school of thought that comes into consideration within spiritual science only makes sense if it is kept far removed from everything that can be called fanaticism and sectarianism. Such things are so widespread in our time that when someone views the world from his own point of view, he is apt to think that anyone with a different line of thought must be a blockhead, or at least lacking in earnest sense of truth or in powers of perception and conscientiousness. For external reasons alone, it would be a pity if Theosophy were to pay homage to such fanatical sentiments, because it must be admitted that, to gain a thorough and comprehensive grasp of the Theosophical world-view, a great deal of patience and time is necessary for those who wish to penetrate deeply into it. large part of our contemporaries who draw their convictions from spiritual science or theosophy do not do so on the basis of a thorough knowledge of all the underlying principles of truth, but rather, understandably, form their convictions out of certain emotional and sentimental interests. This does not mean that the latter are denied their right! Naturally, everyone has a personal right to their own conviction, but it is equally impossible to thoroughly defend the spiritual science world view if the conviction has been gained only in this way. Moreover, since it is only possible to become familiar with spiritual science through difficult, dedicated work, it is understandable that some of our contemporaries feel repelled by Theosophy, and as a rule these are not the people with the worst sense of truth.

We must find it understandable that, as things stand, those of our contemporaries who draw their convictions from science and culture will have difficulties upon difficulties to come to Theosophy; for such people in particular, refutations and contradictions pile up in abundance in the face of what confronts them as Theosophy. But to speak of ill will would be contrary to the tolerance that Theosophy should always practice. Therefore, the task for this evening should be to give a picture of the doubts that may confront the honest seeker of truth when he approaches Theosophy, and then the task for the lecture the day after tomorrow - “How to Justify Theosophy” - is how such doubts can be dispelled.

Even if today's lecture appears to be somewhat disconcerting, that is because it is intended to put itself in the opponent's shoes and present the main lines of his well-founded doubts and refutations. This will also best achieve what is to be shown, namely that the objections of the opponents should be taken as seriously as possible. I do not want to present my opinion, but to make a serious attempt to put myself completely in the position of the opponent, without touching on those lightly-worded objections that are already answered by saying that the opponent should try to get to know Theosophy more closely. Thus, I do not want to address the immature, but rather the concerns that really arise for those who, from the culture of the present, want to take note of the theosophical worldview and then cannot go along with Theosophy, because otherwise they would have to break with everything with everything that arises from the culture of the present, a culture whose reasons cannot be refuted, and which must rather raise justified and thoroughly justified objections, which Theosophy as such must recognize without being able to refute them to the same extent.

Therefore, I would first like to present an extract of the theosophical worldview to you, in the way that it has already been explained in as much detail as possible in many lectures. First of all, in Theosophy you will find the assumption of a supersensible world behind the world of the senses and the mind. Then Theosophy invokes certain methods of research that differ from what is taught in our time by the methods of research and thinking. The world of the senses, it is said, teaches that it is explainable from within itself and for this purpose does not need to seek a supersensible world behind it. Or the opinion is expressed by others that a supersensible world must indeed be assumed behind the sensory world, but that man cannot penetrate it, hence the limits of knowledge must be assumed.

Theosophy emphasizes that man, with his ordinary consciousness, is dependent on the external world of the intellect and, in addition to this, on that of the inner observation of the soul, but that it is also possible to bring the inner life of the soul to a high level of development. When this happens through certain inner exercises, the practitioner, if he practices in the right way and with sufficient persistence, will encounter a high transcendental world from the depths of his soul as he develops his spiritual and mental faculties, so that the sufficiently advanced researcher in the field of the spiritual world can recognize transcendental facts. Then a person developed in this way will be able to think about the nature of man differently than the ordinary consciousness is able to do, which can only recognize the part of the environment that can be perceived by the senses.

Now, however, Theosophy teaches that with heightened consciousness, three supersensible parts can be recognized in the human being itself. Namely, the “etheric body” is said to still be active in the physical human body as the actual animator and shaper of the physical body, which can also be found in animals and even in plants, and which works to ensure that the substances composing the outer body do not follow their otherwise inherent forces and laws as long as they are under the influence of the ether body in the organism, but only after death, when they are left to themselves again. Theosophy or secret science recognizes a third aspect of human nature in the so-called astral body; every living being that develops consciousness does so through the powers of the astral body, which permeates the physical and etheric bodies, which we find in humans and animals, but not in plants. Human nature, however, has a fourth element, the so-called ego, which elevates man from animality and thereby presents him as the crown of earthly creation.

Further pursuit and deeper penetration into the knowledge of man reveals that man differs essentially from the sleeping when awake; spiritual science teaches that in the latter, the astral body with the ego separates from the physical and etheric bodies, and these latter two go into the spiritual world. But in this world, both are then surrounded by darkness from falling asleep to waking up, since for the normally developed person without his physical-etheric tools and without the tool of his mind, nothing is perceptible, and with these only in the physical world, because he does not yet possess any organs for recognizing the spiritual world.

In this view of waking life, spiritual science points out that everything a person has experienced through his senses in his mind, and everything that has happened to him as luck or misfortune, has been deposited in his soul, which carries it through the gate of death in the higher spiritual limbs of the human being. These remain with the human being in a certain way, namely as the I, the astral body and as the essence of the etheric body. With these elements of his being, the human being undergoes experiences in the spiritual world after death, in which he then gathers strength from everything and processes it in a unique way, in order to then, after a longer or shorter time, be able to move back into a physical body that is made available to him within the line of inheritance. In this way it will receive certain qualities from the parents, but the essential abilities will be formed in it, that is to say in its physical body and the next higher members, by its own spiritual-soul core, which his life between death and a new birth, in the purely spiritual world, under different physical and earthly conditions, had further experiences that led him to develop powers that made him suitable for a new life on earth. Everything that the person has experienced in the way of important thoughts, impulses and feelings carries over into a new life, so that this, in its peculiarity, is partly a consequence of the previous life(s).

The various elements of human nature belong to several worlds; the spiritual-mental is of earlier origin than the physical-etheric part, so that we can speak of a spiritual-mental world preceding the physical world, which is, as it were, an earlier embodiment of our earth planet. We must turn our gaze to this and many other things, as well as to the future formations of the same, in order to get an idea of the basis of theosophical science.

If a person with a serious scientific mind approaches such ideas, they will get the impression that everything that the humanities and science of the last few centuries have researched has been turned upside down, for example the fact that the physical body, in all its organs, is permeated by an etheric body, which is seen as the carrier of life. Should not anyone who has immersed themselves in science, especially that of the last two centuries, say that with such a view, Theosophy adopts an amateurish position that is not justified by anything, because what is this etheric body if not the resurgence of the vital force that has been broken since the eighteenth century? The chemical compounds, mixtures and separations can be explained by the forces that can be recognized in chemistry and physics! Apart from these, certain compounds of substances are also seen to occur that are only seen to form in the living organism, not in the external, non-organic nature; hence it was said in the past that there is a life force in the living organism that permeates the organs of the same in a peculiar way.

In the nineteenth century, science made progress with Liebig and Wöhler, namely in that these two researchers also produced in their laboratories those compounds that apparently could only form in the living organism, without claiming the organism's supposed life force. What was more natural than to assume that, once such compounds had been produced outside the organism, they would also have come about inside the living organism without the help of the assumed life force? If science were sufficiently developed, there would be no reason to assume that further, more complicated substances could not be produced in the future, and indeed in the laboratory, without the help of the so-called life force.

If we continue this train of thought, we must eventually be convinced that the living organism also contains only those forces that can be found in the natural world, so that with sufficient scientific progress, even simply organized living beings could be represented! It should be readily admitted that the fact that this possibility does not yet exist does not in any way contradict the possibility of such hopes at a later stage. What, then, is the etheric body of theosophy other than a transfer of the life force long since rejected by science? What else is apparent than that theosophy does not know the above-indicated scope of scientific discoveries and the well-founded prospects associated with them? Nothing but pure lay thinking, only dilettantism is the assumption of an etheric or life body.

This objection is fully justified from our intellectual culture, and a serious scientist cannot lightly dismiss it.

But if we now look at what we have characterized as the astral body, the vehicle of consciousness, we see that these appearances of consciousness present themselves as supersensible experiences, and everything we know of thoughts, sensations, feelings, and impulses of the will belongs to the supersensible world. Nineteenth-century natural scientists also went this far; one need only recall the famous speech given in 1872 by Du Bois-Reymond in Leipzig on the limits of natural knowledge. According to the then prevailing view, the brain was thought to be composed of atoms, so it was not possible to penetrate to an understanding of how the appearances of consciousness should arise from the constant or changing position of these atoms. This radical difference between external appearances was already seriously noticed by natural scientists at that time, who took into account substances and supersensible soul experiences. The latter were regarded as constant accompaniments of the former. The life of ideas changes, for example, with a greater or lesser influx of blood to the brain, so that the phenomena of consciousness are bound to material processes, and the natural scientist therefore finds no difference between such phenomena and, for example, the force of gravity, which is also supersensible and can only be perceived in its effects, not itself, just as supersensible as consciousness. It is bound to substances that attract each other in inverse proportion to the square of the distances and in direct proportion to the masses [...].

Accordingly, for example, Benedict says in his 'Seelenkunde': The phenomena of consciousness within our soul life are no different in their attachment to the substances of our body than gravity, magnetism, [electricity] and the like; why should not such or similar forces emanate from our brain as those forces as accompanying phenomena of material processes? The sentence cannot be defended against exact scientific reasoning, that the phenomena of the soul are something other than the accompanying phenomena of matter. And we must admit: Benedict's principle is one that a person from the point of view of contemporary culture cannot easily get away from, but instead would have to accept that the soul forces of man would be released in death, and in the same way, gravity would have to be be able to break away in the destruction of the material, in order to pass in the meantime into a special realm, a kind of gravity realm [gravity heaven], until it finds an opportunity to reincarnate in a new material. That is a logical objection that a scientific conscience cannot easily get over.

Let us turn to what Theosophy says about the phenomena of sleeping and waking; in contrast to this, the modern scientist believes that the explanation is completely in the air that a supersensible part of the being emerges from the sleeping person. We will therefore try to explain sleeping and waking on the assumption that soul processes are bound to the substances of the body like gravity is bound to every physical substance. We therefore assume that the waking activity, through its wear and tear, leads the human organism to a state where the individual organs are no longer able to maintain waking consciousness, namely in such a way that certain poisons are produced and accumulated, which ultimately cause the person to fall asleep. Because consciousness is thus extinguished during sleep, the purely [animalistic], or rather, [vegetative] activity of the human being sets in, which works out the fatigue or toxin substances again, so that he is regenerated and can enter into the consciousness of waking again.

Thus, we would have a self-regulating mechanism in sleep and wakefulness throughout life. This is an explanation that is entirely in line with our materialistic way of thinking. Hypotheses of this kind can be justified in detail, if erroneous, but because of materialism; it depends here mainly on whether they can be thought logically without the assumption that when you fall asleep something goes out of the person and returns to him when he wakes up. So, from its point of view, scientific thinking must reject the theosophical explanation of sleeping and waking.

In the doctrine of repeated lives on earth, we find ourselves on completely uncertain ground with regard to the latter conditions, while spiritual scientific thinking can only conceive of the present life as the effect of previous lives. But there are also models in natural science thinking that point to this, so that, for example, according to the so-called biogenetic law, all animals and humans must go through all stages of their ancestors' earlier development. human germ shows fish forms 21 days after fertilization, indicating that in times long past, his bodily ancestors were fish-like; thus, there is a certain indication in the present developmental process of earlier bodily conditions. This is how one could characterize old developmental states. Nevertheless, it soon becomes apparent that it is not possible to explain all the characteristics of a person from his ancestors, but only by assuming a spiritual-soul core of being, for example by pointing out that children of the same parents should actually be much more similar than twins usually are.

But all this will not suffice for scientific thinking, which objects that every human being must arise from the mixing of the characteristics of father and mother in their mutual interaction, so that accordingly children of different ages of the parents would have to take different forms, since they would have arisen from the most diverse mixing ratios. Furthermore, at the present stage of advanced research, or precisely despite it, scientific thinking can say: Who should be able to assess the fine structures of the mixing germ?

In addition, it seems frivolous to the modern, materialistic thinker to want to trace the most diverse properties back to earlier lives; because first you would have to eliminate everything that happened in early childhood. Thus, for example, in the case of a sculptor, one would be tempted to trace an outstanding talent back to a past life, whereas it could just as easily be explained by the fact that the person in question had frequent and stimulating contact with sculptures and artists in his youth. (We no longer know for sure, but it had an effect on the subconscious.) You can never be too careful in gathering all the relevant information, in order to provide the appropriate and correct explanation.

In science, there is something called a useful working hypothesis. For example, sunlight used to be seen as the radiation of a fine luminiferous substance that travelled from the sun to the planets, including our earth. But since this could not explain all the phenomena of light, the hypothesis or theory of the cosmic ether was adopted, although no one can directly prove whether a substance flows or the ether moves in waves. But if the undulation theory is correct, then it can be used to explain the phenomena of light and colors and to predict them under certain conditions. Even if the processes take place differently, this theory proves to be useful. It is similar with the Darwinian theory, which cites fish as an intermediate link in the development of humans; it is, after all, possible to understand, for example, the fins of fish as the original limb for the locomotor organs of higher animals and so on, and to bring the lower animals in their development to higher ones in the most diverse organic areas through this explanatory hypothesis with humans in connection.

The assumption of repeated lives on earth could prove fruitful in explaining happy or unhappy physical and social living conditions. But seriously, one cannot treat reincarnation and karma in the same way that a natural scientist proceeds with his working hypotheses, because in natural science we have only one explanation for many phenomena; we trace many phenomena back to a single principle. Thus, as already indicated, the higher animals can be traced back to fish-like ancestors, an assumption that can be elevated to a law through an infinite number of cases and traced back to a single principle. On the other hand, with every human being, we would have to come up with a new hypothesis for each of the many previous lives; if a natural scientist were to attempt this in his field, it would be declared absolutely inadmissible, since, on the contrary, he endeavors to find a common explanation for as many individual events as possible. The idea that all human beings live according to karma is only an abstraction, because each person must be traced back to their own past life. In this way, one could, in the most diverse ways, create justified difficulties from conscientious thinking, raising countless objections from a scientific point of view.

But special objections arise for the materialistic-scientific thinker when he observes how the spiritual researcher invokes a higher, spiritual vision, which the researcher tells him can only be formed through higher soul powers, whereby this spiritual scientific method of the researcher is diametrically opposed to the materialistic-scientific requirement that at any place, at any time and for any person, provided that the essential prerequisites are met, a verification of the established claim should be possible, quite independently of the processes in the interior of his soul. These are completely irrelevant for the scientific researcher for the application of his research method; rather, the second and third researchers should be able to determine the same as the first. This fundamental requirement is contrary to the spiritual scientific method, according to which something can be researched by developing subjective psychic powers; but this is unacceptable to the scientific researcher; the results of such a research method are unprovable to him. He can therefore only classify them in the realm of mere belief, to which everyone can relate as they wish. Thus, all this appears unacceptable to the materialistically thinking person, and to anyone who approaches Theosophy with his own methods and then experiences what and how it researches and teaches.

Numerous other objections arise in the moral, religious and spiritual spheres of life. It is objected that in the theosophical view, what we experience is a consequence of previous lives, and the thoughts and actions of the present life are the cause of the phenomena of the coming life; it is objected that such a view leads to an egotistical morality and conduct if evil is to lead to something that must be compensated for by pain and so on, while good would bring happiness and joy. Would not a selfish morality develop if, for the reasons indicated, one refrained from evil and practiced good? Compared to such a selfish conception of morality, what we encounter from the materialistic view of morality seems like heroism, which assumes that with death the phenomena of consciousness are extinguished like a flame whose fuel has been consumed; a view that assumes that the deeds of the individual gain nothing for himself, but that their consequences, good and evil, flow only in the general world process. Even if this theory can be refuted, it still depends on external reality, not on logical reasons, but on the effect that such a theory has in life.

Among noble minds in the West, we find the views of materialistic morality described above, for example in the Munich Frohschammer, who put forward a very noteworthy moral objection when he said: What does the constant recurrence of a spiritual-soul core lead to? To the view that precisely that which we here in life regard as one of the noblest relationships, namely the love between the sexes, provides the cause for repeatedly, without end, imprisoning one soul after another in a physical body; therefore, I consider reincarnation morally reprehensible. Anyone who devotes themselves to the contemplation of the transcendental world, who turns away from the external world and falls into a state of estrangement from it through a life-denying asceticism, will by no means consider reincarnation to be an ethical or moral teaching. The personal experiences of the spiritual researcher can and will easily be met with contradiction, and how can we be sure that these subjective experiences are not just an illusion?

Such a view is also theoretically refutable, but for anyone who is trying to decide whether or not to turn to Theosophy, such doubts weigh very heavily on the soul, especially when they are combined with Kepler's example, who, as we know, also practised astrology, a peculiar form of astronomy involving high spiritual concepts. We learn from him how he was repeatedly compelled to cast horoscopes for prominent personalities, and then wondered anxiously whether he should explain the future events in full or rather communicate them in veiled terms. So we can see that even the great Kepler, despite his scientific conscience, sometimes comes close to charlatanry. Abysses of a peculiar kind open up at the transition from an old to a new science, at the boundary of which stands the figure of Kepler. If such a significant man is, as is thought, not always protected from dubious obscurities, how is an ordinary person to develop the steadfast qualities when he reaches supersensible insights in an unfree and often immature state, in order to be the bearer of an immovable sense of truth under all circumstances!

Thus, the fear arises that clairvoyant qualities, when penetrating into higher spiritual worlds, lead to dishonesty as a side effect of such abilities, and opponents of Theosophy therefore say: “Morally contestable is even the method, not the development itself, which is supposed to lead to seeing into higher worlds.” Thus, for example, we see how Faust is accompanied by Mephistopheles, the bearer of magical powers; we can sense how close this comes to him when Goethe has him say:

If I could remove magic from my path, forget the spells altogether...

What is not readily within a person thus approaches him from outside as a temptation to immorality.

In religious terms, it is one of the noblest or perhaps the noblest view of man that he stands before a divine being that has created and redeemed him. What does Theosophy make of this supreme divine being? It regards the soul and spiritual core of the self as a spark in the totality of the divine being; the human ego does good and evil, bears the redemption within itself and does not look up to the God of retributive justice, who is instead relocated in one's own soul and can lead the human being to a delusion of unjustified esteem. The core of feeling and perception of religion, the sense of childship, is therefore in danger of being perverted into a worship of self-righteousness.

Thus we have seen how the theosophical line of reasoning and general view of the world and life, and so on, is incompatible with that of other thinkers. For example, human conscience cannot be understood externally, but here the scientific thinker says – compare the book on conscience by Dr. Paul Ree – that conscience is the final result of human development. In the face of this view, spiritual science has to develop an inner tolerance and not describe the opponent as a drip or even as a malicious person, but it should respond to his objections, which seem worthy of consideration due to their weight. Present-day scientists are indeed demanding completely different ways of proving the supersensible truths of the higher worlds, for example in the way shown by Ludwig Deinhard in the first half of his book 'The Mystery of Man', where he leads to the assumption of survival after death and to an understanding of the survival of the same individuality, which is identical with that of the physical-earthly life. This path has often been tried by honest scholars, and we can see that all of them are led from the same established phenomena to the same hypothesis, that after death man exists as a spirit.

For example, the so-called cross-correspondence could make a significant impression on researchers working in this field, in which two or more people, prompted from the depths of their souls, write down the same thing, which then collectively points to a recently deceased personality who was a leader or enthusiastic participant in a movement that had set itself the goal of researching such relationships and it borders on the conscientiousness of the argumentation and the completeness of the same, as the natural scientist demands in his field of phenomena, when in such a cross-correspondence a lady in India sends the messages from the spiritual world that have come to her through the use of her hidden powers of the soul to a personality in London, at an address that is given to her in the same occult way and vice versa. Now there are two types: on the one hand, there are people who allow themselves to be convinced of the existence of a transcendental world by means of processes that border on scientific methods, such as Weber and Zöllner; on the other hand, there are people like the philosopher Wundt, who believed that the researchers mentioned earlier are not entitled to draw such momentous conclusions from the observed phenomena, that the scholar is too gullible and naive for observation and judgment, and that the conjurer is the most suitable examiner for this. He points to the events in a meeting in which samples of excellent mind reading were demonstrated by a medium who had both eyes carefully bound, and in which the impresario was given the information to be transmitted on pieces of paper. The impresario then apparently energetically signaled the medium what was written down and then asked what was on the piece of paper. The medium then stated this with great certainty. Careful observation ruled out any agreed signals, and yet the medium reproduced the most peculiar and intricate messages. The explanation of this phenomenon was provided by a conjurer who recognized the impresario as a ventriloquist whose medium, without speaking herself, only moved her lips during the messages. Professor Weber, who, as already indicated, was keenly interested in the study of occult phenomena and supersensory worlds, had convinced himself of their reality through his experiments; he once saw a sleight of hand artist operating with a banknote, which he made grow to enormous size before the eyes of his audience, without the help of four-dimensional forces, but only by using his sleight of hand skills. Weber was extremely affected when he saw this. Therefore, skepticism may arise when it comes to scrutiny by scholars.

In the first-mentioned experiment of cross-correspondence, one does not even need to raise the objection that someone in India might have read the address of a lady in London without remembering it, and might unconsciously remember this fact from it; one could indeed completely repeat the whole experiment to eliminate such doubts. But apart from that, if one wants to prove something through experiments with such writings, especially that a deceased personality still lives as an individuality in a spiritual world, one is easily tempted to want to prove too much, since the possibility must be admitted that the effect, even of a deceased person, on people still living as a spiritual movement that continues to vibrate after their death, and therefore the premature proof of identity has been questioned. Just as electric waves can be spread over the whole earth by wireless telegraphy, so it is conceivable that the activity and thinking of a person could continue to have an effect for years after his death without the help of mechanical aids, without it being necessary to assume the survival of a human individuality after death.

Thus, as we have already heard in the short time of this lecture, there are objections upon objections, without these themselves being chosen as easy objections, so that one would have to take the view that Theosophy cannot be reconciled with present-day science. In the next lecture, the attempt will be made to show whether this test cannot be made in another way.

To illustrate this in advance, it may be recalled that when Hartmann's “Philosophy of the Unconscious” was published in 1867, in which, among other things, the unsuitability of the purely materialistic view, for example that of Darwin, was shown, there was a storm of indignation among natural scientists, in which the arguments of Hartmann's work were described as dilettantism. Many refutations appeared, among them one entitled: “The Unconscious from the Point of View of Descent...”. In it, everything that could possibly be said against the “Philosophy of the Unconscious” was collected. This writing appeared as the best against Hartmann's presumptions, and Ernst Haeckel said that he himself could not write anything better than the anonymous author of this excellent refutation. Then Eduard von Hartmann himself named himself as the author, the storm of approval soon ceased, and people no longer wanted to recognize him as a member of the materialistic school of thought after he had shown that he could say everything that could be said by the opposing side if he were to take the position of his opponents.

But is it the case that such objections can or cannot be upheld, or, in the former case, is there a possibility for Theosophy to establish its case and refute the objections? We must therefore try to gain a point of view within spiritual science from which Theosophy can be established. If this is possible, then it will become clear whether the arguments put forward in this way are appreciated by the opponents of Theosophy, whether it is actually able to refute the objections of these loyal opponents and to show what it still has to say.

Perhaps deepening some of the questions of yesterday can be our starting point today. Dr Rittelmeyer has already called our attention to some difficulties which exist in understanding the relationship of this Christian-religious Movement to Anthroposophy. These difficulties are such that you actually can't just through, one could call it a definition, try and deal with it, but that it should actually be dealt with through practical application, and then also through a certain study of soul relationships in present-day humanity. The soul relationships in present-day humanity have only really just emerged in the course of the last three to four centuries and far too little consideration has been given to exploring just how difficult these soul relationships really are. Thus you must already be clear about how, out of all the energy and best of will impulses a religious movement can be formed, which can also work powerfully and nonetheless in opposition to other movements of our time where the hearts of people have gradually become lost, if at the same time the needs of humanity were not satisfied by the older, or relatively not so very old, religious streams having become unavailable.

We may not give in to the illusion that in reality it would be possible to lead a religious movement separated from the rest of cultural life, namely to be apart from what is called scientific culture. You must be aware that an atheistic science armed with the highest authority exists today. Now you would probably say, sure, this atheistic science exists as a science, but alongside that some or other contemporary science and those involved there insist they are filled not with a contemporary but an inner piousness; so that there are possibly people who can live quite within this present day atheistic scientific community who say: ‘This is another field but when I'm not active in this field then I find myself in a religious life.’

You see, this separation between the scientific and the religious elements which has been going on for centuries, this inner separation can still not cope with such a strong and pure Movement as yours—because a religious movement must, just like a scientific movement, above all support the truth. It can now seem even trivial when, after having spoken so much about the content of a religious movement, we again return to the elementary idea: the Movement must be truthful. We may not undervalue how strong the present day untruthfulness, the inner unconscious falsehood of civilisation has become. What the first initiators of this Religious Movement felt at the time, when they made the suggestion for founding this Movement, was in reality precisely towards dealing with that inner, unconscious untruthfulness of our present day.

You see, out of the cultural historical discomfort the view has gradually been developed that one must leave science to science; the theologians need not bother with it. The theologians had to create their own principles of truth from which they developed ethical and religious content separated from anything scientific and gradually introduced eternity and religiosity while not bothering with what drove science. It is exactly this detachment of the religious life placing itself opposite cultural life which resulted in deep inner untruth. Those who practice science as it is carried out today can only be atheists if he or she is honest because the manner and way thoughts regarding the world, as it is carried out in physics and chemistry, give no possibility to rise up to any kind of ethic ideal. There exists only one truth for the science of today, namely: “The totality of the world is determined by causes. The world of causality is however neutral towards ethic and religious ideals, completely neutral. Right here we must search for the truth and conclude there is no other way than to remain with the verdict of astronomers: I have searched through the entire universe and haven't found God anywhere, I therefore don't need this hypothesis.” Something else is not possible for science, if one is really honest.

On the basis of such a scientific viewpoint depends how a question such as: “Should we abandon everything moral and ethical?” is answered in the following way: “If we do this then humanity will fall into chaos and therefore it is necessary to tame humanity from the outside with state laws or equivalents.” We then have tamed people where the principle of being tamed becomes nothing other than a higher form of submission just like one applies to animals. Religion, for people who thought like this, only had one entitlement and that was to use it as a means to activate people into mutual opposition. Religion was just a means to an end; only this was allowed by those with a scientific way of thinking regarding the present. A large part of those who undermined humanity like this is as a result of not having an honest disgust for a way of thinking which only takes the half, that is, the scientific method of thought and incidentally invents the theory of how humanity was tamed. When one speaks about religious and ethical impulses with only this attitude then one must be completely clear that all one can speak about are the taming rules. One always steers towards deeper untruthfulness if one doesn't confess these things. On the other hand, atheistic science can't be stopped. Just think how forcefully today intentions arise to establish human institutions solely and extensively based on mere materialistically thought-out inherited principles, for example laws set up for marriage where nothing about inner heartfelt relationships are the decisive factor, but rather, for example, that a doctor decides. These things are argued away but in reality these things do not have an end. For those who want to work from the basis of religious renewal it is necessary to be clear to unite the focus of knowledge simultaneously with the spirit into nature's wisdom, making the spirit prevalent within the wisdom of nature so that right into physics spirituality is alive. This need really be striven for by the fact that the religious movement is based on Anthroposophy. Still, this basis of Anthroposophy needs to be a totally inward, truthful aspect. For this reason it is necessary that the relationship between the Religious Renewal and Anthroposophy is also represented in the correct way.

Isn't it true that Anthroposophy wants and can't be anything other than a quest for knowledge? You must, also as far as your relationship involves its followers, be fully aware that you are working with a path of knowledge. The religious renewal is even a religious movement with a corresponding religious ritual. When both movements work out of their own impulses then only mutual fructification can result. Basically this can never cause trouble. One must, when one is clear about it, know that on the whole, trouble can't appear when the conditions of the time are considered. The Anthroposophical Movement can be seen to have a difficult position because many people thirst for a spiritualised world view and spiritualised knowledge but want to come to their knowledge with more comfort and ease than what Anthroposophy offers. People don't want such intensive inner work which is necessary in Anthroposophy and as a result really absurd points of view and thoughts pop up. It is like this—you only need to remind yourselves about yesterday's lecture—for those who really want to be involved with Anthroposophy, a basic rethink is necessary which creates a radical difference between Antroposophists and those who have no inkling of the existence of such rethinking and transformative sensitivity.

What actually makes a community? A communal thinking and feeling! One can hardly imagine that people who truthfully work with the Anthroposophical impulse would not get such a feeling of community, as it had never before been in the world. Such a fundamental change in thinking has never existed before, even in the Mysteries: then everything was quite similar to popular thought. There is a strong bond where everyone calls and shouts for community which often becomes evident among the youth, surfacing basically as an absurd tendency. However, don't forget we are not in a studio where we can make people out of plasticine, but that people exist out there in all their absurdities, which one need to refer back to, from which there is no escape if one wants to do real work. It comes down to taking these things profoundly and in all seriousness. One tends not to think about all the various fields. Perhaps you will understand me better if I give you a popular example.

In the Waldorf School we now have 12 Classes and students of up to the age of 18 or 19. They all want to be teachers. Now, the first and foremost requirement in teaching and education lies in the non-discussion of the teaching methods to the child, boy or girl; these methods need to remain a mystery. The way things are accomplished these days centre around the child in the Waldorf School; revealing the pedagogical foundation and so on to them as they are growing up until they sometimes know what Waldorf pedagogy is better than the teacher. Yes, when things are like this there can be no progress.

On the other hand it is not acceptable today to dissect things in an outer manner. Recently in a delegation meeting we spoke about the method of how money could be acquired for the reconstruction (of the Goetheanum). A hateful article appeared as a result in a Geneva newspaper in a wild attack, how the poor Swiss people were having a million Franks pulled out of their pockets. Open secrets also don't work. It must come down to the ability to inwardly depend on people, so that when basic rules of secrecy are not given, that a form of tact develops among the authoritative personalities, speaking about something in a specific way and not, for instance, reveal the ground rules of Waldorf pedagogy to a fifteen year old as one would to a thirty year old person. This must gradually come out of it. In fact all kinds of absurd added impulses come to the fore, when things are not considered in depth or with enough strength.

This is how the impulse for community building appears in the Anthroposophical Movement. The Anthroposophical Movement is a movement for knowledge. It is founded on the communality of will, feeling and thought. Thus one can actually consider that the Religious Movement would simply rise out of the foundation of the Anthroposophical Movement, taken up in the way which was once given to religious movements which had come out of archetypal impulses and then developed further.

Before any religious movement existed among the Anthroposophists, a substitute was looked for in all kinds of esoteric circles which were however based solely on knowledge and the aspect considered as ritualistic also was just there to serve knowledge. As a result nothing from these circles could be brought across into a movement for the renewal of religion.

Had things going on at that time, considered then as ritualistic, had these things not been permeated with the pulse of knowledge, they would have been conceived outwardly which is not where they had their origin.

In contrast it is namely so in religious movements, that the ritual itself contains immediate content in each act of worship so that those who for instance refuse to strive for knowledge within the ritual, still through their participation in the ritual shares in the ritual's life, because the ritual, in the way it should work in this Religious Movement, is the speech of the spiritual world, brought down into earthly form, making participation in the ritual something quite positive.

Let us contemplate the central focus of the ritual from this viewpoint. When we look at the Act of Consecration we notice the preparatory part being the Gospel reading. Now here is another difficulty because it is really necessary to get a better understanding of the Gospels than what currently exists. It is really a matter of understanding that the Words of the Gospels are to be taken up quite differently to any other words, which have flowed from civilisation's development through humanity. The Word of the Gospel, when it is taken as the truth, contains within itself something which can be described when one says: The person who reads the Words of the Gospel out loud, speaks as the conduit for something which comes down from the spiritual into the physical world in order for the prepared part of the Gospel text to somehow enable the entire congregation to establish a link to the spiritual world.

Following this, the actual offering takes place, in three parts: Revelation, Transubstantiation and Communion. A real conception of this trinity is not possible if one is not clear about the very moment when transubstantiation is fulfilled, even for those who actually take part, when natural law and ethical law flow together as one, so that quite a different world order is opened up every time for the congregation, each moment when a person is lifted up to the divine, and the spiritual sinks down into the congregation. When one takes this as reality then one must say, something is happening which is completely independent to what one can recognise as happening in it. Mere feeling is sufficient for what precedes it. For knowledge, mere feeling is insufficient. For the preparatory steps to transformation, it suffices to have feeling, therefore actually it is a task, an activity involving the congregation, when the priest celebrates the Act of Consecration for the congregation. This is something which must definitely be accepted and as a result you should never disturb this harmony by asking the question: ‘Could any ritual which is received today out of the spiritual world’—and all our rituals are received from the spiritual world are to some extent ordained by God—‘can it be changed or stopped?’—You see, by somehow evaluating these rituals and come to saying: ‘Yes, it should develop into another state where people can have an invisible ritual’—these questions are unreasonable.

The relationship must be thought of in this way: people are always going to look for a ceremony followed by a sermon; in the sermon the only enrichment flowing into it can come from Anthroposophy, out of spiritual science. It will happen in future that those who are knowledgeable in the topmost degree in spiritual matters, will never reject keeping community with those who attend the ritual. He or she has also no other way of relating to the ritual than, I could call it, a naive person. Therefore the question can't possibly be raised: ‘Do we carry the ritual for the present time and in future substitute it by another?’—Through our founding of the ritual it is established and will continue; it is subject to other rules than those that human beings validate when it is asked: ‘Will there one day be an invisible ritual?’ The Ritual is subjected to the immense cosmic world impulses which include everything in its evolution which comes about in the world. However, the changes of the future will be quite different to changes that have happened in the past.

Take the Mass of the today's Roman Catholic Church. What is present there is the synthetic confluence of all the corresponding rituals of ancient times, deepened in a Christian sense. This is the wonderful element within the Catholic Church which has flowed together out of all the ancient mysteries. However, at specific times in the development of Christianity there came about—these times actually already began in the third and fourth century—times during which there was no understanding any more for what was woven into the sacrifice of the Mass and so it became an empty formula, propagating itself through tradition, one could say, out of respect. Then, seemingly soon, people came with the courage of non-understanding and started to improve all kinds of things. Today, as a result, we have in the Catholic Mass sacrifice, something which gradually, simply through the dying out of language, has become fundamentally incomprehensible. It is celebrated in the old language, without it possibly bringing about understanding. One can regard this sacrifice of the Catholic Mass as a corpse, which is something unthinkably huge and powerful, yet still as a corpse possessing unbelievable power. In totality the peculiar aspect of the Catholic Church is how the priesthood is exceptionally educated philosophically but theologically extraordinarily uneducated. The Catholic theology has no liveliness, so that actually right up to the greatest climaxes Catholic theology is something extraordinarily uneducated. Since the Middle Ages it hasn't undergone any further development. On the grounds of religious needs of humanity, the teaching or sermon all fail to be satisfying, yet by contrast this is not the case with the cult because the cult has an extraordinary power of building the community. This is what is given in which you can engender a feeling of eternity through this new ritual, so that no disharmony need to bear down on your souls. Some Anthroposophists claim that parts of the prescribed ritual can be left out. This question would actually not come about if one has the right attitude. I really don't know out of what grounds these ideas could have come. Because, take the case of the funeral today; surely a religious community will ask for a ritual? So you are called to the Consecration of Man for the whole of humanity and not only with the attitude that it is something temporary, it will be replaced by something else. This is something eternal as far as something can be called eternal on earth. This conflict which appears to be developing among many of you, that Anthroposophy sees the ritual to some extent as something less meaningful or that something else in the future must represent the present Movement, this conflict can only be based on a feeling of a misunderstanding. As soon as you are clear that naturally Anthroposophy lies more on the side of knowledge and that it must give itself over to that, as far as the ritual is considered, then on the other side, people who attend the ritual and also seek the knowledge aspect, because of the strength of the intellect, and approach the ritual from the basis of Anthroposophy—as soon as you are clear about this then you can say to yourself in some way this is only a kind of division of labour. If taken from this basis, conflict should not arise at all.

Now I would like to ask you, following on from these comments, to express whatever you want because I know that much still lies in the depths of your souls.

A question is posed (which is not written down by the stenographer) regarding the lecture given on the 31^st December 1922 in Dornach.

A Saying:

The world's working approaches
As a material reflection to me
In the Heavenly Beings of the stars
I see, through Willing, their loving motion.
Penetrating me with life's water
Forming me through matter's power
The heavenly deeds of the stars
Within feeling I see their wise revolving.

Es nahet mir im Erdenwirken
In Stoffes Abbild mir gegeben
Der Sterne Himmelswesen
Ich seh' im Wollen sie sich liebend wandeln.
Es dringen in mich im Wasserleben
In Stoffes Kraftgewalt mich bildend
Der Sterne Himmelstaten
Ich seh' im Fühlen sie sich weise wandeln.

Rudolf Steiner: What I spoke about then is a kind of cosmic communion. When this is performed meditatively, then under the circumstances as things are today, they could offer people a certain satisfaction. In this way a kind of communion can be received. However that doesn't exclude those who receive communion through their knowledge in this way, when they in their entire soul constitution strive for it today, to also receive communion in another way. The differences should not be stressed because the two things are not contradictory. Do you experience a stronger contradiction here than what you have against the old, still truly understood, Catholic Church? There they have the priest communion and naturally also the lay communion—I don't want to say that all Anthroposophists should be priests. You have those who can give and receive communion and you have those who can receive communion but not give it. When you grasp the difference you have to say to yourself: ‘Those who give communion can't possibly, without it adding some inner experience, take the communion anyhow like the layman. He must experience something more in it.’ Therefore the priest, when working with the communion, must also experience something more, an inner communion, and this he does have. Now, it comes down to strictly adhering to the difference between the priesthood and the laity. Only these two classes exist. Today one walks away from the developments in these olden times, this past time is no longer here.

Today much which was only available to the Priests in olden times is now to some extent also made available to the laity. Our entire modern theology, all its literature is now available. The same can be said to be valid in our case. You can study theology as a layman. If you choose a way of knowledge like Anthroposophy it is self-evident that the thoughts of participants become familiar with such things as would first and foremost been available for the celebrating Priests in past times. Today it is different. We can't put up boundaries. If we would have clung to old principles it would be as if a religious movement existed and within that movement would have been the priesthood who then would have Anthroposophy to themselves, who would have to do everything on the level of profane technicality, as demanded by the times ... (gap in stenographer's notes). If you take that into account you will understand that this communion which the priest celebrates has developed from something which belongs to the Anthroposophical Movement. However, there is no ground for saying: ‘On the one hand we have the priestly, on the other we have cosmic communion.’ Both come from the same foundation, only differentiating in form. They can both stand independently beside one another. So when you enter with profound feeling into these things you will have no difficulties.

A Participant: In the report about the meeting of delegates in February 1923 it is said that the ritualistic element is something which comes from prenatal life. In the course which we attended in Dornach, it is illustrated how our ritual raises up the dead in their life after death.

Rudolf Steiner: This is something which is applicable to all things created out of the spiritual world; the concepts need to be grasped very precisely. To grasp concepts scholarly dialectic needs to be entered into. However we haven't come that far yet, neither in the area of Anthroposophy, nor in the Religious Movement. You see, the way people work in the ritual, to really engage, so that the human soul is involved, is in order for this to lead to the Portal of Death and encounter Christ—this is the one side of the cult. The other side through which that takes place for the human being is like a cosmic memory of what had been experienced prenatally. Let's take an example in ordinary life to make this clear. What meeting makes a great impression on a person today? To have had an encounter, already during his youth, with a venerated person. Now something else is added to this. It is something different, when I depict it, which germinates in the mood of soul towards the future; as a result of this he might approach relationships in life in quite a different manner to the kind of person he had been in his youth. When one partakes in the ritual, one's next, future life is touched. This happens because its origin lies in prenatal life. This works very strongly on the human being.

A Participant: Does one accomplish more by meditating on the Mass or when one celebrates the Mass? One can then come as far as saying we don't need to read the Mass any more.

Rudolf Steiner: Logically that is not quite untrue, but in fact it is not so. When the Mass is read and is then experienced meditatively and thus has an effect on you, then this effect, while depending on a more intense inner activity, actually becomes stronger. However you are not always able to call upon this inner activity. When you haven't read the Mass for some days then its power becomes paralysed. It is true, if one can, then it is good, but when it has had no preparatory stages then these forces are paralysed. It is not true that the inner meditated Mass is as strong as the read Mass, and it must not somehow become an ideal for the Priest, to not read the Mass. Then he could well say: ‘I refrain from working with my congregants, I, alone, want to make progress.’ It is possible to imagine this ideal (not reading the Mass but meditating) but the power which the priest will need, when he wants to read the Mass, this he must not allow to weaken as a result, by him wanting to present such an ideal.

A participant: How does one bring people to the Consecration of Man? Are we to only take people who emotionally come from underdeveloped religious sentiments, to whom the way of knowledge is closed? How should we approach participants if we don't follow the route of thinking?

Rudolf Steiner: You don't just have the ritual, but also in the broadest sense the sermon, lectures, or preaching in the terminological sense. Nothing can be seen as a problem. Today's younger intellectuals who work out of nothing don't want an isolated intellectual aspect, but strive strongly towards ritual.

What can enter here, which must from external sources form a synthesis between the Religious Movement and Anthroposophy, I now want to characterise. On the one hand today's intellect is not enlivened without the ritual. The ritual firstly calls upon the intellect. Today people stop believing they can think if they don't have the ritual. Stopping thinking is a danger of the time. On the other hand I don't see where the limitation must lie when presenting a sermon and ritual. A limitation can only exist where you create it artificially. They don't want to learn about Anthroposophy, they say. That they can't handle because they must! Of course one should not throw Anthroposophy at them because then the problem arises with them saying: ‘We don't want to learn about Anthroposophy.’

A participant: So I won't talk about the ether body, for example?

Rudolf Steiner: That depends on the knowledge of the congregation. I can easily imagine a congregation who relate honestly to the ritual and still can have a need for knowledge. I don't see why you shouldn't speak about the ether body.

A participant: There are actually people with a desire for knowledge and who find their way to Anthroposophy through the ritual. Can we find a possibility to satisfy people who don't want Anthroposophy?

Rudolf Steiner: The question is actually: how will you characterise someone who should be led by you, who will actually be led by you in order for that person to be seen quite separated from Anthroposophy? How must that person be? It is like this: When one really grasps what a person is about, when one really enters into true humanity, then people want Anthroposophy, just as at all times the underlying soul is being sought for. To not want Anthroposophy is only the case with inhibited people. For forty years you could still find elementally healthy people in the countryside, they uttered the highest wisdom. (The following sentence was only partially captured.) Under their pillows they use to hide something—take Jacob Böhme for instance—this is no longer found today. People who have become inhibited in large cities don't come anywhere near such things. As a result I can imagine that another way can be used, other than anthroposophic. Your approach need not be from what is printed in books but what you have experienced through books. For example the concept of the etheric body is easy to bring across to naive individuals. In some regions people called the little substance left in the eyes upon waking, “night's sleep”; the etheric is in there because it comes from the etheric body's activity. Starting points are everywhere. You satisfy people more when you become free of words and come from experience itself.

A participant: Is it possible to find the difference between cosmic communion and the ritual in order to formulate it as sacramental?

Rudolf Steiner: That is something which is difficult to say, because experience of real cosmic communication is already sacramental. All of anthroposophic thought is something sacramental, as I have expressed it already in my Theory of Knowledge in the Goethian world view. Knowledge, when it is true knowledge, strives towards sacrament. It depends more upon us trying to bring things together than to find differences, because in reality you bring yourself together with it.

A question is posed with reference to specific words in a sentence from one of Rudolf Steiner's Dornach lectures of 1922 (indicated by a few connecting words by the stenographer).

Rudolf Steiner: ‘Anthroposophy needs no religious renewal’—so you have correctly formulated the sentence. What will it mean for Anthroposophy, whose foundation is in itself, to need religious renewal? The reverse: ‘Religious renewal needs Anthroposophy!’ What was said there in the lecture, that Anthroposophy needs ritual, was actually directed at Anthroposophists, not at the Movement for Religious Renewal. Such things need to be said because many people believe they need to orientate themselves out of principle, whether they should choose to take part in the Religious Movement. There were members of the Anthroposophic Movement who were much older than Dr Rittelmeyer; when they asked if they should take part in the ritual, one must say to them: ‘In the end you should know this yourself, you must be able to consult Dr Rittelmeyer.’—One may not say that the only way to come to anthroposophy is through the Religious Movement; that would be very wrong. My lecture at that time was directed at Anthroposophists. It is therefore self evident that the Anthroposophists, as they have become lately, could be consultants for the ritual. The opposite is deadly for Anthroposophy: when you say one couldn't come to an anthroposophic understanding (of Christ) if you do not come via the ritual. It is necessary to stress that the lecture was directed at Anthroposophists. The misunderstanding came about by both sides making mistakes of omission in their handling. There are many in the Religious Movement who doesn't know what they should be doing.

Marie Steiner: Some Anthroposophists created the saying: “Dr Steiner wants the Religious Movement to replace the Anthroposophical movement”; that was Dr Steiner's assessment. Similarly at the start of the Threefold Movement it was also suggested it should replace the Anthroposophical Movement. There have already been signs of people believing that Anthroposophy should be disassembled. Lecture cycles at the publishers were cancelled, and such like.

Rudolf Steiner: These things appear in outer practice and do not lead to inner difficulties.

A Participant pointed out that Rudolf Steiner had said during the lecture on 30 December 1922 that there were many people who are orientated towards knowledge but other people with dull religious inclination (text here only copied in key words by the stenographer).

Rudolf Steiner: Yes, that can't be denied, there are people with a thorough orientation towards knowledge and others with just a dull religious inclination. If I said that Anthroposophy can't do anything with people who have dull religious instincts, but only through something like the Religious Movement, then it is true. However it does not mean that the Religious Movement is applicable to only these kinds of people, but it means these people can't do anything with Anthroposophy. These people can only be reached through the ritual, not through Anthroposophy. People with a dull religious inclination are to be involved through the ritual and possibly will become very thoughtful people in their next lives.

A participant: People say: ‘The Anthroposophists have a university, you have a school for children.’ This is the kind of thing we have to deal with.

Rudolf Steiner: Recently I saw a big poster which came out of Austria with sheer nonsense on it, claiming how concerned individuals reach the spiritual world, but on the other side it said: ‘With my spiritual system I include all things which are only approached one-sidedly by Anthroposophy and Theosophy etc.’ With such things inner difficulties can't be judged. Such people one may not take as tragic. You can't be upset by this.

A participant: To prevent such things being proclaimed, the leader of the branch needs to take action.

Rudolf Steiner: These are outer things. The leader of branch is not involved with what members do outside the branch.

A participant: It is said directly that the two paths are contradictory. This frightens people and they stay away.

Rudolf Steiner: This is not inner difficulty, it is outer action of practical life. That these things happen cannot be stopped. One can't characterise something in a trivial way which is connected to the most serious profundity; for this is needed clear formulation, with serious words which can possibly appear as falsely expressed. What one or other branch leader has to say is quite insignificant. Otherwise we have to regard it as a task to only have branch leaders who are infallible. Your spiritual tools are there to educate people.

Emil Bock: In a certain sense there was no confusion in the beginning. We were looking for our field of work as somewhere different from the Anthroposophic field. We probably took the declarations of the opposition as our connecting point which made us too separate from the Anthroposophic work. Some of us also had no more time for it. As a result of these difficulties arising among the Anthroposophists we realised we could not speak from the side of Anthroposophists. As a result of the course of events we had separated ourselves somewhat out of the anthroposophical line. Now we ask you, please help us, to find the true way in the anthroposophic work again, because we have a strong desire not to fall away from the Anthroposophic work and see how as a result we have attracted the possibility to really contribute to the clarification of us not being seen as Anthroposophists but as standing for Religious Renewal. We do not want to be poor representatives of Anthroposophy.

Rudolf Steiner: The danger was actually there from the beginning. It all depends on the correct critical attitude being maintained. It is possible through many things that judgement is rectified. For several months already, Dr Rittelmeyer is very actively involved in the Management (Forstand) of the Anthroposophic Society. What he says is highly recommended. It is already so that the strength of each one of you becomes strongly recommended. I will never again, at an occasion where social relationships are to be healed by the ritual, participate without a representative of the Religious Movement working with me. At burials I will no longer speak alone, without a priest. The ritual needs to be celebrated by the priest. In this way correct judgement must be built up. In discussions misunderstandings arrive, but the facts speak for themselves.

It is important that the Religious Movement does not deny Anthroposophy. You are mistaken if you believe you can make progress without it. It is far better to be clear and stand firm on the foundation of Anthroposophy. Everything must be openly brought to light. You may not allow people to come to the opinion that it has nothing to do with Anthroposophy. The Waldorf School is completely related to Anthroposophy. Some lecturer has said that the Waldorf School is quite nice if only their basic views could be dropped.

It is this which I want to stress: If Anthroposophy is the foundation of the Waldorf School then we don't create an anthroposophic sect education, but by going through Anthroposophy we strive towards a general education of mankind.

We have the task not to clarify misunderstandings but simply to speak the truth.

The last talk should suggest with a few lines that spiritual science can investigate the deeper profundities and the truth of the biblical documents and that it can read that in the right sense again which is written in this document. With some simple lines should be shown how concerning the Bible such a right penetration is possible into the deeper sense of the Bible in a quite unexpected way and how it can lead many human beings to a recapture of this document of humankind. What could be said in the last talk about the position of our newer time, about its research, its criticism, its worldview compared with the Old Testament someone can also say concerning the New Testament. In addition, here we are able again to point to the fact that in the seventeenth, eighteenth centuries a criticism started which has analysed and cut the Gospel to pieces, a document of such an immense significance for countless human beings for centuries, and attacked its bases. One would have to tell a long story if one paid attention to this biblical criticism of the New Testament in detail. How could it be different, because since that time, after the invention of the art of printing, the Bible has come to all hands, and with it, the materialistic thinking got out of control! How could it happen other than that people recognised clearer and clearer that there are contradictions in the Gospels?

For example, you need only compare the genealogies of Jesus in the Matthew Gospel and the Luke Gospel, if one adheres to the external letter of the matter, and you find that already the first chapters of both Gospels are contradictory. Not only that Luke and Matthew differently give the ancestors; also, the names do not comply. If you compare the single facts of the life of Jesus, you can find contradictions everywhere. In particular, people realise how extremely the first three evangelists, the writers of the Matthew, Mark, and Luke Gospels, on one side, and the writer of the fourth so-called John Gospel, on the other side, contradict. The result was that one tried to produce an accordance of the first three Gospels in a certain way. One believed to find that these three evangelists—even if they differ from each other in many details—give a picture of Jesus which is attractive to the whole view and to all ways of thinking of a newer time, at least to many personalities of our time.

However, many people realised long-since concerning the fourth evangelist that there cannot be talk of a historical document at all. Not only that the writer of the John Gospel, who completely brings the facts differently grouped, above all, concerning the miracles that he describes quite differently; it also becomes apparent that his whole standpoint towards the centre of the whole world history is different. This sight has developed more and more. If we want—we cannot go into the details—to turn again to the sense of this research, it is approximately this that one says that the three Gospels could give the image of the superior Jesus, the founder of the Gospel, if one considers them as portrayals of the brilliant time. The fourth Gospel is a confessional document, a kind of hymn of that which the writer wanted to show concerning his faith in the crucified Jesus. He wanted to give no story, but a teaching writing.

In particular, in the nineteenth century, this view settled in the souls of numerous people more and more due to the so-called Tübingen School, which the great Bible scholar, the brilliant Ferdinand Christian Baur (1792–1860) led. Baur's view is approximately this: the John Gospel is late; it was written very late whereas the other evangelists wrote earlier, still after certain reports of those who, perhaps, themselves had experienced or come to know it from persons who had witnessed the story in Palestine. However, the John Gospel originated only in the second century. Not from the original story, but influenced by the Greek philosophy and by that which had already appeared in the Christian communities, it were written, so that John created a picture of Christ Jesus, which could uplift the human beings in such a way that it is lyrical in certain ways. It teaches how one began to think and to feel like a Christian up to the second century, however, it was no longer able to inform about the events in the beginning of our era.

Indeed, there were also souls who vindicated the opposite viewpoint. If one must say on the other side that Christian Baur and his students proceeded with tremendously critical astuteness, nevertheless, we are not allowed to forget a biblical scholar like the historian and academic Gförer (August Friedrich G., 1803–1861) who asserts that the Gospel is due to the apostle John himself. With diligence he shows how just this Gospel shows almost in each sentence that an eyewitness wrote it or that somebody who had received his message from eyewitnesses wrote it. Gförer goes so far that he says in his Swabian way that anybody who cannot believe in the fact that the Gospel is due to John is out of his mind. He is also out of sorts with those who say that it is not historical and who bear down on this Gospel with all possible arguments.

The question that interests here is this: did really research, history cause this view in spite of all astuteness, in spite of all scholarship, which is never denied a moment?—Someone who can thoroughly explore not only the outside of history, but is able to immerse with his thinking and feeling, and with his whole view in the mental undergrounds of human development, notices something else. It was not only the historical sense, it was not only the so-called objective research, but they were the ways of thinking of the newer time, the beloved views that were spread more and more since the last century.

They did not accept that the confidence and the ideas of the figure of Christ Jesus survived which prevailed for centuries, that not only a superior being was included in Jesus of Nazareth, but a universal being, a spiritual-divine being that is not only related to the whole humanity but to the whole development of the world generally. The confidence and the idea got lost that this spiritual-divine being worked in the mortal body of Jesus of Nazareth, and that we face a unique event there. This contradicts the ways of thinking so much that they had to be directed against such confidence. The critical research slipped in unconsciously to justify what the habitual ways of thinking wanted for the time being. More and more the sense came up, which could not endure that anything topped the normal human-personal, the sense that says to itself, yes, there have been great human beings in the world evolution: Socrates, Plato, or others. Indeed, we have to admit that Jesus of Nazareth was the greatest. Nevertheless, we must remain within this human level.—The fact that something could have lived in Jesus that one can compare to the normal human being contradicts the materialistic mental images, which settled down more and more. We can see this sense slipping in unconsciously and combining with that which the so-called historical research ascertained.

Why did the first three evangelists become more and more the respected ones and the writer of the John Gospel the mere lyricist and confessional writer? Because they could say to themselves, the three evangelists, the Synoptics, describe an ideal human figure that does not top the human level, even if Jesus is an elevated one. It flatters the modern sense if one says what a modern theologian said: if we subtract everything supersensible and spiritual from Jesus of Nazareth, if we take the simple man of Nazareth, we are closest to Jesus.

That is not possible with the John Gospel. It immediately begins with the words: “In the beginning the Word already was. The word was in God's presence,” before a material world existed. What there was in the spiritual primeval grounds became flesh; it walked around in Palestine in the beginning of our calendar.—The writer of the John Gospel applies the highest wisdom to understand this event and to bring it to understanding. In view of this matter, it is not appropriate to speak of the simple man of Nazareth. Hence, he was never allowed to deal with a historical document. These are not only scientific reasons, it is the development of the usual thoughts, emotions and sensations which have found their expression in that which the Bible criticism of the New Testament and the historical research claim today to have the unconditional or at least relative authority of these matters.

However, there emerges another question from spiritual science. Let us position ourselves really on the ground on which some new researchers have positioned themselves. The ones wanted to portray an event that took place in the beginning of our calendar. They added mythical and legendary aspects. Assume that we positioned ourselves on this ground. There we must ask ourselves, is it yet possible to speak about Christianity as such under these conditions? Is it possible to speak about Christianity if we understand the documents, which tell about this Christianity, purely materialistically? Is it possible to behave towards the whole Bible in such a way?—Two things should be stated at first that prove that the question cannot be put different than it was put, and that it can be answered in outlines. Let us assume that Christian Baur's view is right that something took place in Palestine that one has to explain as the external historical, and that in the course of time the writers delivered that out of the prejudices of their time to the future generations what was in them. Let us assume that we have to presuppose such a research while we believe in the descent of a spiritual being from spiritual spheres that lived in Jesus of Nazareth, resurrected, won the victory of life over death—what we regard as the real essence of the Mystery of Golgotha. One has to break this doctrine, Baur says. One considers this view as a dogmatic one. This view must be cancelled. One has to investigate an event in Palestine like another historical event.

Is it then possible to speak generally in the true sense of the word of Christianity, of the Bible as such a work which reports what has to appear? On the other hand, I would like to point to two facts. What is the first big and enclosing effect of the Christian worldview based on, an effect that nobody can deny? What is the sermon of Paul based on? Is it based on the interpretations of the Gospels by a new sober research? Never Paul's strength is based on an announcement of that which is to be exhausted by the means of history. Paul's whole efficacy is based on an event that you can understand only from supersensible, never from sensuous causes. Someone who checks Paul's writings sees that his whole teaching is based simply on the fact that he could win the conviction and the experience that Christ has risen, and that in the Mystery of Golgotha the life in spirit carried off the victory over death.

Wherefrom does Paul take his conviction of the true nature of Christ Jesus? He does not take it, as for example the others who were round Christ Jesus, from an immediate instruction. He takes it, as you all know, from the event by Damascus. He takes it from this fact and he could say, I have seen Him who lived, suffered, and died in Palestine, I have seen Him living.—Paul means nothing but that he has seen Christ in spirit and has won the truth from the spiritual view that Christ lives. He announces Christ, whom he got to know in his spiritual view. In addition, he equates this appearance to the other phenomena, because he says to us, after death, Christ appeared to various persons, to the twelve disciples and others, and in the end to me as a mistimed birth.—With it, he thinks that he really beheld Him in a higher view, who carried off the victory over death, and that he knows since that time that Christ lives for someone who rises in the spiritual world.

Here we already stand concerning the New Testament where the new spiritual science must separate from any only literal view of the Bible. What do you find as a rule in the writings of the so-called new research about the event of Damascus? Saul became Paul in an ecstatic condition, a condition into which one cannot look really. This escapes from the human research. Yes, it escapes from the external human research. We have emphasised this so often in spiritual science that the human being—what we can learn in the following talks—can ascend to the knowledge of a higher world which is round him in such a way, as the colours and the light are around a blind person. The human being can behold this higher world as the operated blind-born can learn to see colours and light. This takes place by the spiritual-scientific methods in the soul of the true pupil of spiritual science and enables him to behold into the spiritual worlds, to behold what is there. What takes place with this pupil, what every pupil can bear witness today and at all time, that took place with Paul. He received it: to hear with ears which are not sensuous ears to see with eyes, which are not sensuous eyes. Then he could also perceive Him who lived in Jesus of Nazareth. So Paul's whole strength extends into the supersensible realm. If you take the whole Paul as he is, you can say, what he said is set aglow by “Christ was raised. Hence, our faith is not futile” (1 Corinthians 15:17).

If one goes just into the effects of Paul's sermons how he spread that form of Christianity, which went through the world, then one can never say, it does not depend on going back to any supersensible facts to investigate the facts about Jesus. One says that one must apply the usual scientific forms. Then one forgets not only the original facts in Palestine not only that which happened during 33 years, but also what happened for the dissemination of Christianity. One forgets that it is based on a supersensible event, and that this supersensible event is to be understood at first.

However, in quite similar way we also find if we consider the matters only seriously and really that the Old Testament, at least its most important document, the Law, is based on something similar. We find that the whole mission of Moses, the whole strength of Moses by which he provided big services to his people is also based on a supersensible event. We had to say the day before yesterday that if the spiritual researcher develops higher, so that he becomes sighted in the spiritual world and is able to behold into the spiritual undergrounds of the things that he can survey the facts of the spiritual world in pictures, in imaginations. Yes, you can express the processes, which happen in you if you ascend to the spiritual fields, only in pictures, however, you must get clear that somebody who speaks in such pictures does not want to speak about the pictures as those, but thinks that one has these pictures as expressions of his supersensible experience.

The supersensible experience by which Moses got his mission was clearly described in the phenomenon of the burning bush. There we see Moses, the leader of the people, facing his God, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, who issued the order to Moses to act for his people what we find happening then as the action of Moses. While we use this, we already face a basic issue of the whole Bible, namely the question: how have we generally to position ourselves in order to penetrate deeper into this document to these two supersensible facts, which make any merely external research impossible? How have we to behave to this basic issue of the Bible in the spiritual-scientific sense? We can penetrate if we bring the contents of the revelation or the experience of Moses home to ourselves.

The most important traits are only cited. Moses faces the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. God gives him the order at the same time to lead the people from Egypt, to increase it to a certain size and to teach it a certain attitude.

If then Moses wants to have something by which he can exculpate himself before the people, so that he can say who he is and who sends him, God reveals his name: “I am the I-am.” Nobody can understand the word who is not able to go into the whole sense and the being of old naming. Old naming is unlike the modern naming. Old naming should absolutely express the being of the personality, the being of that who faces us. In “I am the I-am” the being of the God had to express itself in particular who faced Moses, and who calls himself “the Lord the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.” Why does he call himself the Lord the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob? There is a secret hidden behind it, which must be unravelled. We can unravel it only if we move up to it with the help of spiritual science. We have to emphasise it over and over again at various places that the human being consists of the members of his being, that we only face one part of the human being as the physical body, that we have higher members which are supersensible, which are the real bases, the creative principles. We must add the etheric body or life body, then the astral body and as the fourth the bearer of the ego.

The human being has the physical body in common with the apparently lifeless beings, with the minerals, the etheric body with the plants and all living beings, the astral body with the animals, which can have passions and desires. Because of the ego, the human being towers above all sensuous beings, which surround him. Spiritual science has always recognized these four members of the human being.

We have to point to the physical body that also has its spiritual primal ground and is only condensed from the spiritual. As well as ice originates from water, the physical originated from the spiritual. We must go far back in the view of the spiritual development if we want to look for the first spiritual origins of the physical human body. This fourth member is absolutely the oldest of the human members. Today the physical body is the densest. It emanated from the spirit in the distant past. It has become denser and denser, has experienced some changes, and has thereby taken on its physical figure. This is the oldest in the human being. A younger member is the etheric body or life body. It came later; hence, it is less condensed. The astral body is even younger.

The ego is the youngest member, the bearer of the human self-awareness. All these members originated from spiritual primal grounds and spiritual beings, from divine-spiritual beings. We can say, spiritual science shows that this ego, by which the human being became the modern self-conscious being, immersed in the body. It was composed, before he became an ego-being, of the physical, etheric and astral bodies. The Bible also distinguishes those beings now who are the creators of these three human members. The teaching of Moses speaks about the creator of the human ego, of the creator of the bearer of the human self-awareness. Hence, the Bible also sees in the God who let the ego flow into the human being, so to speak, that God who was the last to come concerning the evolution of the human being. The divine beings, the Elohim, whom we have strictly distinguished from the God Yahveh or Jehovah, are the creators of the physical, etheric and astral bodies. They are exactly distinguished in the Bible from the God appearing last in our evolution, from the Yahveh God, from that who brought the ego to the human being.

If we ask, where does the human being find the being of this God, this youngest of the creative gods about which the Bible starts speaking in the fourth verse of the second chapter of the Genesis? Spiritual science shows that where the human being finds his ego in himself, which differs so substantially, already after its name, from all other beings round us, that he there finds a drop of this divine being in himself. This is no pantheistic teaching, also no explanation of the fact that the human being has to find his God in himself. Asserting this would be like someone who asserts that a drop of water is the same being like the sea—and says: this drop of water is the sea.

If we speak in the sense of spiritual science, we speak about something infinite, comprising, universal that is connected with the earthly development and the other things that belong to this earthly development. In our ego, we find a spark of this God Yahveh as we find the same being in the drop of water as in the sea. Nevertheless, it was a very long way the human development had to cover, while the God Yahveh started forming the human being in such a way that he could grasp the ego consciously. The strength of the ego had to work in the human being already well before, before he got the consciousness of the ego. Moses became the great precursor bringing the consciousness of the human being to the ego. However, these forces work and form in the human evolution already long before. They form in such a way that we can recognise their way if we deal with the evolution of the human consciousness itself.

Let us look somewhat back in the development of the human consciousness. One uses the word development very often today, but as drastically, as intensely as spiritual science takes the word development seriously, it is the case with no other science. This human consciousness, as it is today, developed from other forms of consciousness. If we go back far to the origin of the human being, not in the sense of materialistic science, but in such a way, as I have explained it the day before yesterday, then we find that the human consciousness appears more and more different, the farther we go back. The consciousness that connects the various intellectual concepts, the external sensory perception in the known way originated firstly, even if in the far-off past, but it originated firstly. We can find a condition of the consciousness at that time, which was completely different from today because memory was completely different in particular. The memory of the modern human being is only a dilapidated rest of an old soul force, which existed quite differently. In old times when the human being did not yet have the inferring force of his today's mind, when he was not yet able to count in the today's sense, when he had not yet developed his intellectual logic, he had another soul force for it: he had developed a universal memory. This had to decrease, had to withdraw, so that at its cost our today's mind could develop. This is generally the way of development that a force takes a backseat, so that the other can appear. Memory is a decreasing force; mind and reason are increasing soul forces.

For those who hear these talks already for some years, it cannot be something especially miraculous what I say now. For the others it will seem absurd if one speaks about the nature of memory in the following way. What is the appearance of the human memory? It is that which remembers yesterday, the day before yesterday and so on, until the childhood. Then, however, it discontinues once. The memory did not stop in old far-off past, not in childhood, not even at birth; but like the modern human being remembers what he himself has experienced in his personal life, the prehistoric human being remembered what his father, his grandfather had experienced through whole generations. Memory was a soul force through generations that extended really. For centuries, memory survived in the old far-off past, and another kind of naming was connected with the different formation of memory.

We come to the question now: why is talk of individuals in the first chapters of the Bible who become hundreds of years old like Adam, Noah? Because it makes no sense to limit these human beings. Memory reached through generations up to the primal father. One gave this whole generation one name. It would have made no sense to give the name Adam to a single person. Thus, in those days one gave the name to that which remembered, holding on the same recollection, for centuries from generation to generation—Adam, Noah. What was this? It was that which goes through father, son and grandson, but maintained recollection. So faithfully, the biblical document maintains these secrets, which one can understand only with the help of spiritual science.

If we look at the consciousness of the ego with which we comprehend the being of the Yahveh God, we see that the ego lives in us between birth and death, and that it maintains its kind between birth and death. Thus, the ego maintained for generations at that time, for centuries. As we speak today about the ego and know that it goes back as far as we can remember, the human being of primeval times said to himself: it makes no sense to call myself an ego. I recall my father, grandfather, and great-grandfather.

His ego went through generations, and it had even a name. As we find an expression of God in our personal ego if we become engrossed in this ego, the ancient human being said to himself, looking up through the generations: God who lives in the ego lives for generations,—as a divinity which then Moses recognised in the higher worlds. The God was the same who lived as an ego from generation to generation in ancient times. One declared as ego, in the parlance of the past, what reproduced as an expression of the Yahveh God, with the Yahveh word “I am the I-am.” Moses learnt to recognise this in his spiritual revelation. In contemplating the burning bush this was revealed for the first time. The same God once lived from generation to generation, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He was the force, which lived in the memory and brought everything at the same time that founded the human order. Thus, we look up at the predecessors of Moses. In the biblical sense, we look up at the patriarchs, at those, in whom the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob lived.

These times needed no external commandments, no external laws. For that lived on with the lively memory, quite different from ours, which one had to do. According to what did one act in these primeval times? If you understand the Bible correctly, you find that the human beings did not act after commandments. One acted after that which memory said to one, what the father, the grandfather et cetera had done. With his blood, the human being got the direction to that which he had to do. In these ancient generations was something like a spiritualised instinct that one can compare with “acting instinctively” as we call it today. Not after a commandment the ancient human being acted, no, he acted after the character of his being, after his type. How did Abraham, Isaac and Jacob act? They acted in such a way as the blood running through generations induced them. They had brought down the God Yahveh with their egos, whether they waged war whether they lived in peace. They had no commandments; they had no law. The spiritualised instinct of God lived in them.

At the time when Moses appeared, the human personality was on the first level of its development. There its consciousness broke away from this common generational consciousness. There the generational memory had already stopped quite thoroughly. There one did no longer have the spiritualised instinct of action. There something else had to replace it. The God of Abraham, of Isaac and Jacob—who in his spiritual physical figure gave Moses the law, the commandments because one did no longer have the spiritualised instinct—had to regulate the external order, the social living together by commandments, by laws. It is the same God who worked before as a natural force, who is now efficient as legislator to found the external order with laws. We see that it has a deep sense to read the words at this point: the God of Abraham, of Isaac and Jacob. The God who calls himself the God “I am the I-am” is the same as the fourth member of the human being, the same who let flow the ego into the human being. However, the human beings could not take up the spiritual nature of the ego in their consciousness. A longer preparation was necessary to it, and this takes place at the time, which is portrayed in the Bible as the Old Testament, at the time of Moses up to the Mystery of Golgotha. Hence, this time is a time of promise, which the new Gospel shows, the beginning of the “time of fulfilment.” The God announces himself to Moses as the “I am the I-am.”

He announces himself in such a way that he orders the external order of the human beings, their living together by laws indirectly by Moses's vision. Humankind lived this way in the pre-Christian time in which the God was creating, in which the Yahveh God was forming, in which the “I am the I-am” lived, in which, however, humankind could not yet live consciously but according to the external law coming from the Yahveh God. More and more the time approached when humankind should become completely aware of the ego. For the whole antiquity, there was only one means for the human beings who could not yet behold, could not yet face God in the physical world. There was only one way how this God could become effective for them. This was the law, the order. This applied to the external world.

Moreover, there was a supersensible way to get to know this God, and these were the mysteries or initiation. What was initiation? Everything that was delivered to certain personalities which were regarded as suitable to apply the methods of spiritual-scientific research to develop the forces and abilities slumbering in the human being, so that they could behold into the spiritual world. Hence, for the confessors of the Old Testament it would be in such a way to behold God spiritually from face to face who lives in the “I-am.” If they applied this method, they were able to see and to hear with spiritual eyes and ears independently what Moses had seen, when the God, the “I-am” gave him his mission. Only in the mysteries, only by initiation this was possible.

However, there were also those who recognised the “I am the I-am,” but they had to go through the procedures, the methods with which the human being is transformed into an instrument of the higher vision, the vision in the spiritual world. So the God who already lived in Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob was concealed to the physical world. He ordered the world by law. To the initiate, the secret of the mysteries becomes visible in thinking. Then the time came when the Mystery of Golgotha should take place. What happened there, actually? Imagine what the initiate experienced in the old times. Only sketchily, I can describe the process of initiation by meditation, concentration and the other exercises. The soul of the neophyte was prepared for a long time. Then the processes of initiation were finished during three and a half days. There the sages of initiation prepared the neophyte prepared so far, so that he was transported to a state in which his physical body was completely sleeping. It was not only sleeping but it was like dead, so that the neophyte could not use his physical senses, his physical eyes, and ears. For it, however, he beheld with the organs of his spiritual members into the spiritual worlds. He could perceive there if he was outside his body if he was not connected with the physical organs. Then he could behold what lived invisibly in him as the “I am the I-am;” but he could behold it only in the depths of the mysteries. Then he was awoken—as everybody knows who has experienced these things—in his physical body and used the physical senses again. Now he had the full consciousness: I am the I-am, I was in the spiritual world. What has spoken to Moses, the “I am the I-am” faced me, and it is that which refuses eternity to me, which has entered my body. I was connected with it. I was connected with the divine primal bearer of the I-am whose reflection is my I-am.

Thus, the initiate returned to the physical world and bore witness of the fact that something spiritual exists in the ego, because he had beheld it. He could give his listeners news and message of it. However, one could only behold the “I am the I-am” in the spiritual world. By the event of Golgotha, the same being descended to the human beings who had announced himself by Moses in the burning bush with the words “I am the I-am.” This complies completely with the sense of the John Gospel: the ego became flesh in the body of Jesus of Nazareth, lived in it, and walked around among the human beings. This primal force brought the human being to the height on which he stands today. The primal force became a human being; the human being became a divine being and walked around among the human beings. It was possible that on Golgotha that took place as a historical event within the evolution of humankind, which the initiates could behold only in spirit: the fact that the Christ-being carried off the victory over the death of matter.

This is the historical-external-real fact, which the initiates often experienced in the mysteries. This was the course of initiation in the ancient times in the deep darkness of the mysteries with those who left their physical bodies for three and a half days, walked around in the spiritual world and recognised that a spiritual-divine being descends into the physical world, and that this event would take place once as a historical fact. This was the course of initiation. However, the time came now when humankind came to the event of Golgotha turning emotions, sensations, and thoughts to it by faith.

Then the understanding originated from it. It was something new. One got as something external that one could have, otherwise, only by the rapture in the spiritual world. If one assumes this in such a way, we understand why Christ Jesus says: I am the I-am in a completely new figure. He says, look back at the primeval times, at that which lived as the everlasting in the human being that lived in Abraham, Isaac and Jacob that made known itself then in the Law of Moses. Now the time has come when the ego becomes aware in the single person, when the human being has to become aware in his ego, in the divine living in him.

If it was in the old times in such a way that the human being looked up at the God that he beheld and could say to himself: what lives in me lives for generations,—it is now in such a way that he finds the divine in his ego if he beholds into himself. The divine from which any ego originated was embodied in Jesus of Nazareth, and someone understood this who wrote: In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and God was the word.—By these words, the being of the innermost human nature and at the same time the primary source of this innermost being is meant. He lets Christ Jesus say, what lives in me a spark of which is in every human being existed before the Gospel was.—The significant sentence in the John Gospel was “Before Abraham was, I am.”—Before Abraham was, the “I-am” was, this I-am which is not bound to any time which was before Abraham, was already in the spiritual primeval grounds of the human being. While he calls himself the primary source of this I-am, Christ spoke the significant words: “Before Abraham was, the I-am was.”

Therefore, we realise how the sense of human development, which flows through these fundamental books of humankind, the Old and the New Testaments, is brought back to life again by spiritual science. In addition, we realise how to us the most important words become readable first if we fathom the sense of these books, regardless of the words, with the help of spiritual science. I give an example that gives something to think to the materialistic sense. I would like to remind you of the resurrection of Lazarus. There such a man like Gförer says: who asserts that the John Gospel is not written by John, helps himself saying, the writer wrote down a lot, as he experienced and understood it, but the Lazarus miracle must have been told to him. He cannot have been present.

One must understand the Lazarus miracle only correctly. Let us understand it in such a way that Christ when he entered the world took on the body of Jesus of Nazareth. Let us believe, however, that that which prepared in the Old Testaments became expression in the New Testament. He had to have somebody who could understand him completely, who could penetrate in the deepest sense into what he could announce, and that means that he had to initiate a person in his way.

Initiation stories are told to us secretly at all times. The Lazarus miracle is nothing else than the miraculous and tremendous representation how Christ created the first initiate of the New Testament. Christ waked up Lazarus as an initiate recalled the soul of his pupil to the body who was for three and a half days in a state similar to death, after he had walked around in the spiritual world. Someone can simply see through all that who understands something of it, because it is the language in which generally initiation stories are told. “This illness is not to end in death; through it God's glory is to be revealed and the Son of God is glorified” (John 11:4). This means: external appearance as revelation of the inside; so that one has to translate the sentence in truth: “The illness is not to end in death, but that the God manifests as an external appearance, so that He can also be revealed to the senses.”

In Lazarus slumbers the deeper human being who has the ability and the strength that it could be developed in mysterious way in him, could be led up in the spiritual world, so that he could recognise the being of Christ, the Son of God. However, this strength had to develop first. Christ Jesus developed it in Lazarus, so that the divine that rested in Lazarus could be revealed, and could reveal the Son of God. Christ Jesus created in Lazarus the first to know from own inner observation who Christ Jesus is real. At the same time, this miracle shows—because it is to someone a real miracle who wants to accept the external physical principles only—what the pupil concerned has to go through during the three and a half days. Because this can be compared to a real death since the etheric and the astral bodies are raised out of the physical body and only the physical body lies there.

Thus, we have understood even such a miraculous event like the Lazarus miracle—miraculous only to anyone who cannot explain it out of spiritual science. All that reveals itself to you in the Lazarus miracle if you have the light only, which illuminates it with the words: “His illness is not to end in death but to reveal the inside.”—If these abilities are woken in the human being, it is like a birth. As a child arises from the womb, the higher is born by the lower human being. In the same way, the illness of Lazarus is connected with the birth of the new life, of the divine human being, so that the divine human being is born in the physical human being, in Lazarus.

So we could go through the John Gospel step by step and would experience that that which happens in the spiritual initiation had to be described quite different from that which we see in ancient times when with quite different spiritual powers the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is working. If we look into the Bible in such a way, then it is the high universal book again, which lets shine to us what we have now found ourselves. While we must admit—we can say this—that only someone who has developed the higher spiritual forces can come to this truth, we have also to admit and say—if it faces us in the John Gospel—what brought it in these writings. While a new spiritual researcher approached the Gospel and the whole Bible, he learnt to see this and can say: the human beings will come to the true value of this document and recognise that only a materialistic prejudice can speak the words: “the simple man of Nazareth.” However, because of true knowledge we have recognised Christ as an overwhelming world being living in the body of Jesus of Nazareth.

The first three Gospels appear to us in relation to the John Gospel possibly, as if three persons stand grouped on a slope of a mountain and every reports what he sees. Everybody sees a part. Someone who looks down from the higher vantage point surveys more and portrays more from this higher vantage point. We come to know not only what the others below describe, but also what can make the three understandable at the same time. That is why it is not difficult to say, who stood on the higher vantage point, but for us it is in such a way that the first three writers were also initiates in certain respects. However, the deep initiate, who could write much deeper, could look much deeper than the three others could and about the true spiritual facts of the matters, which lie behind the sensuous, this is the writer of the John Gospel. So the Gospels combine harmoniously and show that the Mystery of Golgotha cannot be understood as a usual historical event, but is only explicable by a process as we find it with Paul, who says: “the life I now live is not my life, but the life Christ lives in me” (Galatians 2:20). What the external research shows beside becomes also important in the spiritual research. If we look at Christianity, it is important to us to figure the clairvoyance of Moses out which is shown to us in the vision of the burning bush. It is this what one had to explain. I have to emphasise that this new spiritual science is able to form the picture of the world events of its own accord, to look at Christ, so to speak, spiritually from face to face and to find Him again and, hence, to find Him truly in the Gospels. That biblical scholarship is not really without presuppositions, which says, we want to investigate the Bible like any other story.

For it assumes the dogma that there can be only usual, sensuous, natural facts. Only spiritual science is really without presuppositions, and this leads to a renewed recognition and high esteem of the Bible in all its parts. A time will come when maybe those are disgruntled who want to say today that only the simple mind is able to grasp the Bible. This wisdom must misjudge the Bible. The time will come when just the wisest wisdom estimates the highest what is given to us in the Bible because clairvoyance will face clairvoyance in the Bible. Then some word, which is written in the New Testament, appears in a new light. It will become apparent that a document like the Bible can lose nothing by impartial research. It would be sad if any research cut this Bible of its reputation, of its name. A research that cuts the Bible of its name has only not come far enough. Research that goes until the end will show the Bible again in its greatness.

The human being is allowed to do research freely. Who has the view that by research religion could perish shows with it only that his piety stands on weak feet. The divine being put the impulse of research in the human being, so that he is active. It would be a sin against this impulse if one did not live researching. I recognise God by my research. God recognises Himself in my research. Truth is a good in the human development from which the religious life will never have anything to fear. However, this is a basic truth, which penetrates the New Testament completely.

You should not take those into accounts who want to keep away the human beings from the Bible because of comfort, and who say, if you come to philosophers and interpret the Bible, these say, they want to know nothing about it.—However, such a research is based on comfort. However, that research is justified and right which says: we cannot go deeply enough to understand what is written in the Bible.—That research in the Bible is the right one that goes into it in free research and then understands the Bible in the right sense. These researchers understand the truth of the biblical saying: “you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:32).

The transition from early childhood to the school age is marked by the change of teeth at about the seventh year, and in studying this period it must above all be remembered that up to the seventh year the child is working, as it were, as an inner sculptor and with the creative forces of the head is organizing and moulding his whole being. All that has been present in his environment, including the moral qualities, now plays a part in the development of the vascular system, the circulation of the blood and the processes of the breath, so that as a physical being man bears within him throughout his earthly life the results of the imitative period of his childhood from birth up to the time of the second dentition.

It cannot, of course, be said that he is conditioned only by this, for naturally much can be rectified in the body later by the exercise of moral forces and by inner activity of soul. Still we should realize with what a wonderful heritage we can endow the child on his path of life if we are able to prepare his physical organism to be the bearer of moral and spiritual qualities, if we help the work of the sculptor within him up to the age of seven by ourselves living a moral and spiritual life at his side.

Certain details and other matters of which I spoke yesterday, will come to light as the lectures proceed.

The teacher, then, must understand that when the child has passed his seventh year and comes then to actual school age, these plastic forces are transformed into an activity in the soul which must be reckoned with by his teacher. The child longs for pictures, imagery, and this fact should indicate to us the fundamental principle of his education at this age. From the time of the second dentition up to the age of adolescence, the development of the rhythmic system, i.e., the breathing and the circulation of the blood and also the digestive functions, is all-important. The soul of the child during that period longs for pictorial imagery and his rhythmic system is there to be dealt with by the teacher in an organic bodily sense. And so a pictorial, imaginative element must dominate all that the child is given to do; a musical quality, I might even say, must pervade the relationship between teacher and pupil. Rhythm, measure, even melody must be there as the basic principle of the teaching, and this element demands that the teacher must himself feel and experience this ‘musical’ quality.

It is the rhythmic system that predominates in the child's organic nature during this first period of school life, and the entire teaching must be pervaded by rhythm. The teacher must feel himself so inwardly living in this musical element that true rhythm may prevail in the class-room. He must be able to feel this instinctively.

It thus becomes evident that during the early years of school life (that is to say after the age of seven) all true education must develop from the foundation of art. The reason why education in our day leaves so much to be desired is because modern civilization is not conducive to the development of artistic feeling. I am not here referring to the individual arts, but to the fact that sound educational principles can only arise from a civilization penetrated with artistic quality. This has very great significance.

And if we can imbue our whole teaching with artistic quality, we influence the rhythmic system in the child. Such lessons actually make the child's breathing and circulation more healthy. On the other hand, our task is also to lead the child out into life, to develop a sound faculty of judgment for later life, and so during this age we must teach him to use his intelligence, though never by constraint. There must also, naturally, be some physical training and exercise, for it is our duty to help the child to have a healthy body in later life, in so far as his destiny permits. But to accomplish all this we need a deeper insight into the whole nature of man.

In our modern civilization, where all eyes are concentrated on outer, material things, no attention is given to the consideration of the state of sleep, although man devotes to it one-third of his earthly life. This alternating rhythm of our waking and sleeping is of the greatest possible significance. Never should it be thought that man is inactive while he sleeps. He is inactive only in so far as the outer, external world is concerned, but as regards the health of his body, and more especially the welfare of his soul and spirit, sleep is all-important. True education can provide for a right life of sleep, for the activities which belong to man's waking hours are carried over into the condition of sleep, and this is especially the case with the child.

At the base of all artistic creation lies in reality the unceasing activity of the rhythmic system. Breathing and the action of the heart continue without intermission from birth to death. It is only the processes of thought and will that induce fatigue. Thinking and movements of the body cause fatigue, and since they everywhere come into play, we may say that all life's activities cause fatigue. But in the case of the child we must be especially watchful to guard against over-fatigue. The best possible way to do this is to see that throughout the all-important early school years our teaching has a basic artistic quality, for then we call upon the child's rhythmic system where he tires least of all.

What then will happen if we make too great a demand on the intellect, urging the child to think for himself, forcing him to think? Certain organic forces that tend inwardly to harden the body are brought into play. These forces are responsible for the salty deposits in the body and are needed in the formation of bone, cartilage and sinew, in all those parts of the body in short that have a tendency to become rigid. This normal rigidity is over-developed if intellectual thinking is forced. These hardening forces are normally active during our waking consciousness, but if we make undue claims upon the intellect, if we force the child to think too much, we are sowing the seeds of premature arterial sclerosis.

Thus here too it is essential to develop by means of a true observation of the nature of the child a fine sense of the degree to which we may call with safety upon the different forces at work. A most vital principle is here at stake. If I allow the child to think, if I teach him to write, for instance, in an intellectual way, saying: ‘Here are the letters and you must learn them,’ I am overstraining the mental powers of the child and laying the germs of sclerosis, at any rate of a tendency to sclerosis. The human being as such has no inner relationship whatever to the letters of modern script. They are little ‘demons’ so far as human nature is concerned, and we have to find the right way to approach them. This way is found if to begin with we stimulate the child's artistic feeling by letting him paint or draw the lines and colours that flow of themselves on to the paper from his innermost being. Then, as the child's artistic sense is aroused, one always feels—and feeling is here the essential thing—how greatly man is enriched by this artistic activity. One feels that intellectuality impoverishes the soul, makes a man inwardly barren, whereas artistic activity makes him inwardly rich, so rich in fact that this richness must somehow be modified. The pictorial and artistic tends of itself to pass into the more attenuated form of concepts and ideas, and must in a measure be impoverished in this process of transference. But if, after having stimulated the child artistically, we then allow the intellectuality to develop from the artistic feeling, it will have the right intensity. The intellect too will lay hold of the body in such a way as to bring about a rightly balanced and not an excessive hardening process.

If we force intellectual powers in the child we arrest growth; but we liberate the forces of growth if we approach the intellect by way of art. For this reason at the Waldorf School value is placed upon artistic rather than upon intellectual training at the beginning of school life. The teaching is at first pictorial, non-intellectual; the relation of the teacher to the child is pervaded by a musical, rhythmic quality, so that by such methods we may achieve the degree of intellectual development that the child needs. The mental training in this way becomes at the same time the very best training for the physical body.

To the more sensitive observer there is abundant evidence in our present civilization that many grown-up people are too inwardly rigid. They seem to walk about like wooden machines. It is really a characteristic of our day that men and women carry their bodies about like burdens, whereas a truer and more artistically conceived educational system so develops the human being that every step, every gesture of the hand to be devoted later to the service of humanity brings to the child an inner sense of joy and well-being. In training the intellect we free the soul from the bodily activities, but if we over-intellectualize, man will go through life feeling that his body is “of the earth earthly,” that it is of no value and must be overcome. Then he may give himself up to a purely mystical life of soul and spirit, feeling that the spirit alone has value. Right education, however, also leads us by ways of truth to the spirit that creates the body. God in creating the world did not say: Matter is evil and man must avoid it. No world would have come into being if the Gods had thought like this. The world could only emanate from the Divine because the Gods ordained that spirit should be directly and immediately active in matter.

If man realizes that his highest life in every sphere is that which is directed according to divine intention, he must choose a form of education that does not alienate him from the world, but makes him a being whose soul and spirit stream down into the body throughout his whole life. A man who would deny the body when he immerses himself in thought, is no true thinker.

***

The waking life is beneficially affected if we develop the intellect from the basis of the artistic, and all physical culture has a definite relation to the child's life of sleep. If we wish really to understand the form that healthy culture and exercise of the body should take, we must first ask this question: ‘How does bodily exercise affect the life of sleep?’

All bodily activity arises supersensibly from the will, is indeed an out-streaming of will-impulses into the organism of movement. Even in purely mental activity the will is active and is flowing into the limbs. If we sit at a desk and think out decisions which are then carried out by others, our will-impulses are, nevertheless, streaming into our limbs. In this instance we simply hold them back, restrain them. We ourselves may sit still, but the orders we give are really an in-streaming of the will into our own limbs. We must therefore first discover what is of importance in these physically active impulses of the will if their unfolding is to have the right effect upon the state of sleep; and the following must be taken into account.

Everything that is transformed into action by the human will sets up a certain organic process of combustion. When I think, I burn up something in my organism, only this inner process of burning up must not be compared with the purely chemical combustion of the science of physics. When a candle is alight there is an external process of combustion, but only materialistic thinking can compare this inner process of combustion with the burning of a lighted candle. In the human organization the processes of outer Nature are taken hold of by forces of the soul and spirit, so that within the human body, and even within the plant, the outer substances of nature are quite differently active. Similarly the burning process within the human being is altogether different from the process of combustion we see in the lighted candle. Yet a certain kind of combustion is always induced in the body when we will, even though the impulse does not pass into action.

Now because we generate this process of inner combustion, we bring about something in our organism that sleep alone can rectify. In a certain sense we should literally burn up our bodies if sleep did not perpetually reduce combustion to its right degree of intensity. All this must again be understood in a subtle sense and not in the crude sense of Natural Science. Sleep regulates the inner burning by spreading it over the whole organism, whereas otherwise it would confine itself to the organs of movement.

Now there are two ways of carrying out bodily movements. Think of the kind of exercises children are often given to do. The idea is (everything is “idea” in a materialistic age in spite of its belief that it is dealing with facts) that the child ought to make this or that kind of movement in games or in gymnastics, because only so will he grow up to be a civilized human being. As a rule movements which grown-up people practice are considered the best, for since the ideal is that the child should grow up an exact copy of his elders, he is made to do the same kind of gymnastics. That is to say, a certain opinion is held by ordinary people and must apply also to the child.

As a result of this abstract public opinion, outer influence is brought to bear on the child. He is given this or that exercise merely because it is customary to make these movements. But this sets up processes of combustion which the human organism is no longer capable of adjusting. Restless sleep is the result of mere external methods of physical culture.

These things cannot be observed by the methods of ordinary physiology, but they take place nevertheless in the finer and more delicate processes of the human body. If we give children these conventional gymnastic exercises, they cannot get the deep, sound sleep they need, and the bodily constitution cannot be sufficiently refreshed and restored in sleep.

If on the other hand we can give cur educational methods an artistic form (and remember, in artistic activities the whole nature comes into play) a certain hunger for physical activity will arise quite naturally in the child, for, as we have seen, the excessive richness of the artistic sense reacts as an impulse towards the more sobering element of the intellect. Nothing so easily induces a craving for bodily exercise as artistic activity. If the child has been occupied artistically for about two hours—and the length of time must be carefully arranged—something that longs for expression in movements of the body begins to stir in the organism. Art creates a real hunger for true movements of the body.

Thus gradually we should lead over into games, into free movements in space, what the hands have expressed in painting and drawing, or the voice in singing. Also the child should be encouraged to learn some kind of musical instrument at the earliest possible age, for this involves direct physical activity. The inner forces must be allowed to stream out into movements in space, which should be a continuation, as it were, of the inner organic processes called up by the artistic work in the school. Physical training is then a natural development from the methods of teaching that are right for this age of life, and there is an intimate connection between the two.

If the child is given only such physical exercises as his artistic work creates a need for, he will get the kind of sleep he needs. A right provision for the waking life can thus cause a right life of sleep in which all the organic processes of combustion are harmonized. Bodily and mental training alike must develop from the artistic element. Thus especially so far as the body is concerned, nothing is more essential than that the teacher himself should be an artist through and through. The more joy the teacher can experience in beautiful forms, in music, the more he longs to pass from abstract words into the rhythms of poetry; the more the plastic sense is alive in him the better will he be able to arrange such games and exercises as offer the child an opportunity for artistic expression. But alas! our civilization to-day would like the spirit to be easy of access, and people do not feel inclined to strive too strenuously for spiritual ideals.

As I said in a previous lecture most people, while admitting the inadequacy of their own education, claim at the same time to know what education ought to be and are quite ready to lay down the law about it. And so it comes about that there is little inclination to take into consideration the finer processes of the human organism, as to how, for example, an artistic conception of gymnastic is determined by the artistic activity itself. What are the movements demanded by the human organism itself? No artistic feeling is brought to bear on the solution of these problems. The reading of books is the main occupation of the modern intellectual class; people study Greek ideals and a revival of the ‘Olympic Games’ has become a catch phrase, though this ‘revival’ is of a purely external nature. The Olympic Games are never studied from the point of view of the needs of the human organism, as they were in Greece, for the modern study of them is all book-learning, based on documents or outer traditions that have been handed down.

Now modern men are not ancient Greeks, and they do not understand the part played by the true Olympic Games in the culture of Greece. For if one penetrated fully into the spirit of ancient Greece, one would say: the children were instructed by the gymnasts in dancing and wrestling, as I have described. But why were they thus instructed? This was due to the Olympic Games, for these were not only artistic but also religious in their nature—a true offspring of Greek culture. In their Olympic Games the Greeks lived wholly in an atmosphere of art and religion, and with a true educational instinct they could bring these elements into the gymnastic exercises given to children.

Abstract, inartistic forms of physical culture are contrary to all true education, because they hinder the development of the human being. It would be far better to-day if, instead of trying to find out from books how to revive the Olympic Games, people made some attempt to understand the inner nature of man. For then they would realize that all physical education not based on the inner needs of the organism sets up an excessive process of combustion. The result of performing such exercises in childhood will lead in later life to flabbiness of the muscular system. The muscles will be incapable of carrying out the behests of the soul and spirit.

While on the one hand a false intellectual education inwardly so hardens the body that the bones become burdensome instead of moving with resilience in harmony with the soul, on the other hand the limbs are weakened through too strong a tendency to the process of combustion. Man has gradually become a creature who is dragged down on the one hand by the burden of the salts that have formed within him, and on the other hand is always attempting to escape, to free himself from those organic processes which are due to faulty combustion. An intimate knowledge of man is necessary before a true relationship can be established between these two processes of combustion and salt-formation. Only when we lead over artistic feeling into the intellectual element can the tendency to over-rigidity be balanced by the right degree of combustion. This right balance then affects the life of sleep, and the child sleeps deeply and peacefully. The restlessness and fidgetiness caused by most modern systems of bodily training are absent. Children who are forced to practise the wrong kind of physical exercises fidget in soul during sleep, and in the morning, when the soul returns to the body, restlessness and faulty processes of combustion are set up in the organism.

Our conceptions must therefore be widened by knowledge, for all this will show you that a profound understanding of human nature is essential. If in this earthly existence we hold man to be the most precious creation of the Gods, the great question must be: What have the Gods placed before us in man? How can we best develop the human child entrusted to us here on earth?

Up to the seventh year the child is through and through an imitative being, but from the time of the change of teeth onwards, his inner nature longs to shape itself according to the models set up by a natural authority.

A long time ago now I wrote The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, and in view of what I said there, I do not think you will accuse me of laying undue stress upon the principle of authority in any sphere of social life. Although man's self-expression is directed by an impulse of spiritual freedom, it is just as fully subject to law as the life of Nature. It is therefore not for us to decide according to our likes or dislikes what kind of education should be given to our children between the time of the change of teeth and adolescence. Education should rather be dictated by the needs of human nature itself. Up to the second dentition, at about the seventh year, the child imitates in every gesture, nay, even in the pulsations of the venal blood and in the rhythms of the breath, everything that goes on around him. From birth to the age of seven, the environment is the model which the child copies. But from the seventh to the fourteenth or fifteenth years, to the age of puberty, he must unfold a free spiritual activity under the influence of natural authority. This must be so if development is to be healthy and free and if the child is rightly to use his freedom in later life.

The faculty of personal judgment is not ripe until the fourteenth or fifteenth year. Only then has the child developed to a point at which the teacher is justified in appealing to his faculty of judgment. At the age of fourteen or fifteen he can reason for himself, but before this age we injure him, we retard his development if we enter into “the why and wherefore.” The whole of later life is immeasurably benefited if between the seventh and fourteenth years (approximately, of course) we have been able to accept a truth not because we see its underlying reason—indeed, our intellect is not mature enough for this—but because we feel that the teacher whom we revere and love feels it to be true. Our sense of beauty grows in the right way if we are able to accept the teacher's standard of the beautiful—the teacher to whom we give a spontaneous, and not a forced respect.

Our feeling for the good will also be a guide in later life if we have not been forced to observe petty rules, but have realized from the teacher's own warm-hearted words how much he loves a good deed and hates a bad one. His words can make us so warmly responsive to the good and so coldly averse from evil that we turn naturally to the good because the teacher himself loves it. Then we grow up, not bound hand and foot by dogma, but filled with a spontaneous love for what the teacher declares to be true, beautiful and good. If during the first period of school life we have learnt to adopt his standard of truth, beauty and goodness because he has been able to express them in artistic imagery, the impulse for these virtues becomes a second nature, for it is not the intellect that develops goodness. A man who has over and over again been told dogmatically to do this, or net to do that, has a cold, matter-of-fact feeling for the good, whereas one who has learnt in childhood to feel sympathy with goodness and antipathy to evil has unfolded in his rhythmic nature the capacity to respond to the good and to be repelled by what is evil. He has a true enthusiasm for the one and power to resist the other. In later life it is as though under the influence of evil he cannot breathe properly, as if by evil the breathing and the rhythmic system were adversely affected.

It is really possible to achieve this if after the child has reached his seventh year we allow the principle of natural authority to supersede that of imitation which, as we have seen, must be pre-dominant in the earlier years. Naturally authority must not be enforced for this is just the error of those methods of education that attempt to enforce authority by corporal punishment.

I have heard that what I said yesterday in this connection seemed to suggest that this form of punishment had been entirely superseded. As a matter of fact, what I said was that the humanitarian feelings of to-day would like to do away with it. I was told that the custom of caning in England is still very general and that my words had created a wrong impression. I am sorry that this should have been so, but the point I want now to make is that in true education authority must never be enforced and above all not by the cane. It must arise naturally from what we ourselves are. In body, soul and spirit we are true teachers if our observation of human nature is based upon a true understanding of man. True observation of man sees in the growing human being a work of divine creation. There is no more wonderful spectacle in the whole world than to see how definiteness gradually emerges from indefiniteness in the child's nature; to see how irrelevant fidgeting changes into movements dominated by the inner quality of the soul. More and more the inner being expresses itself outwardly and the spiritual element in the body comes gradually to the surface. This being whom the Gods have sent down to earth becomes a revelation of God Himself. The growing human being is indeed His most splendid manifestation. If we learn to know this growing human being not merely from the point of view of ordinary anatomy and physiology, but with understanding of how the soul and spirit stream down into the body, then as we stand with pure and holy reverence before that which flows from divine depths into the physical form our knowledge becomes in us pure religion. Then as teachers we have a certain quality that is perceptible to the child as a natural authority in which he places spontaneous trust. Instead of resorting to the cane or using any form of inner punishment such as I mentioned yesterday we should arm ourselves with a true knowledge of man, with the faculty of true observation. This will grow into an inner moral sense, into a profound reverence for God's creation. We then have a true position in the school and we realize how absolutely essential it is in all education to watch for those moments when the child's nature undergoes certain changes. Such a metamorphosis occurs, for instance, between the ninth and tenth years, though with one child it may be earlier with another later. As a rule it occurs between the ages of nine and ten.

Many things in life are passed by unperceived by the materialist. True observation of the human being tells us that something very remarkable happens between the ninth and tenth years. Outwardly, the child becomes restless; he cannot come to terms with the outer world and seems to draw back from it with a certain fear. In a subtle way this happens to almost every child, indeed if it does not occur the child is abnormal. In the child's life of feeling, a great question arises between the ninth and tenth years; he cannot formulate this question mentally, he cannot express it in words. It lies wholly in his life of feeling, and this fact intensifies the longing for its recognition. What does the child seek at this age?

Till now, reverence for the teacher has been a natural impulse within him, but at this age he wants the teacher to prove himself worthy of this reverence by some definite act. Uncertainty rises in the child, and when we observe this we must by our demeanour respond to it. It need not be something specially contrived. We may perhaps be especially loving in our dealings with the child—make a special point of speaking to him—so that he realizes our affection and sympathy. If we watch for this moment between the ninth and tenth years and act accordingly, the child is saved as it were from a precipice. This is of far-reaching significance for if this sense of insecurity remains it will continue through the whole of later life, not necessarily in this particular form, but none the less expressed in the character, temperament and bodily health.

At all times we must understand how the spirit works in matter and hence upon the health of the body and how the spirit must be nurtured so that it may rightly promote the health. A true art of education unmistakably shows us that we must conceive of this co-operation of spirit and matter as harmonious and never as in opposition. Modern civilization with its tendency to separate everything is guilty in regard to educational questions. Its conceptions of Nature are materialistic, and when people are dissatisfied with the results of this conception of nature they take refuge in spiritualism, attempting to reach the spiritual by methods that are anything but scientific.

This is one of the tragedies of our day. A materialism which intellectualizes everything is now only able to understand the concepts itself has evolved about matter; materialism however can never reach the heart of matter. And modern spiritualism? Its adherents want the spirits to be tangible, to reveal themselves materially by means of table-turning, physical phenomena and so on. They must not be allowed to remain spirits, and so invisible, intangible, because men are too lazy to approach them in a super-sensible form.

These things are really tragic. Materialism speaks only of matter, never of the spirit. But as a matter of fact materialism does not even understand matter, but speaks of it only in empty abstractions, while spiritualism, imagining that it is speaking of the spirit, is concerned only with matter.

Our civilization is divided into materialism and spiritualism—a strange phenomenon indeed! For materialism understands nothing of matter and spiritualism nothing of spirit.

Man is both body and spirit, and true education must bring about a harmony between the two. It can never be too strongly emphasized that the goal of education must be to give man an understanding of the spirit in matter and a spiritual understanding of the material world. We find the spirit if we truly understand the material world, and if we have some comprehension of the spirit we find, not a materialized spirituality, but a real and actual spiritual world.

If humanity is to find a path of ascent and not be led to its downfall, we need the reality of the world of spirit and an intelligent comprehension of the world of matter.

Dear attendees! I am well aware that there are many personalities who, based on their education, are called upon to judge and who will not find what I will venture to present this evening scientific, and that the various reasons and objections to the spiritual science meant here must actually have been exhausted by those who represent them, I would say, from their own nature. Due to the limited time available, I cannot go into objections today. In fact, if I do not want to be too verbose – I would actually have to give a whole series, a cycle of lectures – I can only give a brief, cursory sketch of what the essential goal of the spiritual science just mentioned is.

I would like to draw attention to just one thing from the outset: that what is most unusual, what most often gives rise to objections to what is presented here, is that it is not about the expansion of any kind of scientific or other knowledge or other knowledge in any direction, in the way that this knowledge already is, but that it is a matter, dear honored attendees, of developing a completely different kind of knowledge instead of, or rather in continuation of, the one that people are accustomed to according to our present-day consciousness of time. This spiritual science wants to show that the usual, familiar knowledge is not suitable for penetrating into the reality of the world in which the fundamental and most meaningful questions about the human being are rooted, the questions about human immortality and human freedom.

But there is another factor that must be taken into account if we are to arrive at the right kind of spiritual science. This is that in order to penetrate to a different kind of knowledge that can only penetrate into such questions as those mentioned, in order to penetrate to this knowledge, one must first have had, with one's whole soul, with one's whole knowledge and other human struggles, must have had two-sided experiences, not just experiences that are otherwise recognized as experiences of knowledge, but experiences that are really connected with human development in its deepest, most meaningful sense. Experiences that, so to speak, bring people together with everything that leads them to the limits of reality in the loneliness of knowledge, and so on, and so on.

So these experiences are two-sided, honored attendees. The one who wants to advance spiritually must first have experienced what can happen in our soul in the face of the desire for knowledge when it appropriates, in one way or another, the knowledge of nature that has reached such a high level of development and such tremendous perfection in our time, or at least in such a way that it can have an experience of what knowledge of nature reveals to the soul, what it gives it. I can only indicate and characterize natural knowledge. I am not inclined to belittle natural knowledge in any way. Those who enter into spiritual science will see that it recognizes natural science, especially in the form that corresponds to the new era.

Knowledge of nature is suitable for penetrating to a certain degree into reality. But this knowledge of nature comes to certain areas where it has to develop concepts, and in the face of these concepts, what the soul has in its deepest depths as a goal of knowledge usually fails. Such concepts are already the concepts of matter as the carrier of material existence, as they are handed down to us through observation of the senses.

You may be aware of the amount of honest, conscientious, and serious thought that has gone into such ideas in order to arrive at their meaning, such as the idea of matter or force and the like. But anyone who not only tries to speculate, to philosophize about such ideas, but who follows with his soul everything that the soul can muster to form such ideas out of experience and thought, comes to say to himself: It is in the nature of the human organization to form such ideas, to form such alternating in the changing world and then leave it at that, not to penetrate any further, because – as I said, I can only give results, you can find the rest in my books – because man is forced to put these ideas forward in order to have, so to speak, a backing to develop the other life, namely the life of knowledge.

What is the situation with these images? It is like a mirror. You stand in front of a mirror, dear ones, and see yourself in it. The mirror is necessary for you to see yourself in it. Certain images in our organization are necessary for us to arrive at other images. They are there like a mirror of the soul. If we want to penetrate into these ideas in the same way as we usually do into our external reality, it is as if we wanted to break the mirror to find out what we see in it. This is actually the case with all borderline ideas in the knowledge of nature.

If you wanted to continue in the same way, you would be in the same situation as if you wanted to break a mirror to find out what is behind it and what causes you to see yourself in it. This is also the experience that one has when reflecting on what is taken for granted in philosophy. If one wants to penetrate behind the surface of things through philosophy and speculation, it is like breaking a mirror to discover what one will not find behind it.

Now, for someone who sees something like this in the direct experience of the soul, the significant and important question arises: What is it about human nature that we must inevitably come up against such limits, that we must indeed place something in front of us that we can use as a counterweight, that we do not break, to put it figuratively, but simply have to leave in our everyday consciousness? Where does that come from? When one investigates this question, one arrives at a meaningful human soul experience, a secret of the soul; one arrives at recognizing how something in human life, in the whole human organization, is connected with this mirroring nature of our knowledge of nature. One can answer spiritually researched questions of the soul life to a certain extent.

What would human soul life be like if it were not like this, if we did not have this mirror in front of us? One would have to miss an element in this human soul life that is absolutely necessary for this human life, for human existence between birth or conception and death. If human knowledge were such that it could disappear into this borderline perception, then the human soul would have to do without the possibility of grasping in love that which it can only see in the mirror through its emotional life. The nature of the mirror, which is connected with our outer sensuality, is at the same time that which ensures that we do not face external reality in a coarse and unintimate way, but rather that our thoughts fail at the moment when they kill love in a dry and sober way. We must be organized in such a way that we cannot go further on the path of ordinary sensory knowledge or its dissection than we can, so that we do not lack the ability to love.

I would like to make this very clear: the fact that we are limited to these two sides is what makes us capable of love, and so the spiritual researcher comes to realize through direct soul experience that knowledge of nature cannot lead to true reality, because delving into ordinary knowledge, into this true reality, causes the ability to love to dry up in man. This is the first experience one has when on the path of spiritual science.

What I have told you now is described in more detail in my book 'The Riddle of Man'. It arises as a direct, real experience; that is one thing. There are very many people who have not quite clearly or more or less intuitively realized that knowledge of nature does not lead to the depths of human soul life, or to spiritual existence at all. Such people have doubts about the knowledge of nature and then turn to another kind of knowledge. This other kind of knowledge gives the second experience I have to talk about, which must be preparatory for the spiritual researcher. The first is the failure of knowledge of nature, the second is the failure of another kind of knowledge, which very many people seek at the moment when they often only instinctively doubt knowledge of nature. That is mysticism. Mysticism is to be understood only in the sense that I myself will characterize it.

Mysticism in the ordinary sense is understood to mean immersing oneself in one's own soul life with the means available in everyday consciousness. One wants to remain there, but one tries to turn one's attention away from the sensual world, one tries to become blind and deaf to it, so to speak, to sink down into what one can experience in one's own soul life. This mystical knowledge is described by many as very satisfying, since the path of the external does not lead to the secrets of existence, does not lead to the core. What is called philosophy is a hybrid. Many branches of philosophical knowledge tend towards what I call mystical here, others towards knowledge of nature. Anyone can gain knowledge by immersing themselves if they let Meister Eckehart or other mystics take effect on them.

The experience shows that by diving into the depths of the soul life with the ordinary consciousness, whether it is meant more or less scientifically, mystically or religiously, one also comes to unsatisfactory results in this way, as in the external way of knowing nature. If we are honest, if we are fully conscious, if we are not a dreamer or a fantasist, we will always be able to say to ourselves on the mystical path of higher self-knowledge: Something intrudes into what one experiences inwardly in contemplation, something that is connected with the subjective experience, that does not penetrate below the foundations of the subjective human will, something colored by what one gives shape to, and in the end one says to oneself: Even in this way, one does not go further than images, very meaningful, often inwardly shattering images perhaps, that arise from an intimate coexistence with the core of the world, but actually only images. One learns to recognize the pictorial character as a mystical experience, especially when one wants to penetrate mystically into human experience with full real deliberation.

And so we are confronted with a certain limit here as well. What is it in the human organization that makes it necessary for us to come up against a limit even with mystical knowledge? What would a person lack if, following the ideal of certain mystics, they were able to immerse themselves in the depths of their soul in such a way that they collided with the essential core of existence, where the core of our soul life also lies? Just as we previously lacked the ability to love, so now another soul ability would be unable to be our own if we were able to penetrate to the core of our own existence and that of the world through mystical contemplation; a meaningful, indispensable soul ability would not be there, that is the ability to remember. On the path that leads us to the core of existence with everything we experience in the world, we would not be able to encounter in our soul the power that makes us capable of remembering as human beings. We have to keep our imagination, our perception, our feeling and our will separate through our organization, because the ability to remember is placed in the middle of them. By immersing ourselves in ourselves, we must be able to remember.

We see, two already harrowing experiences are there from which the spiritual researcher must start, and the spiritual researcher must have the courage to say to himself: These are essentially the two ways in which one can somehow penetrate with the ordinary consciousness. He must also have the courage to reshape this ordinary consciousness, to give it a different character, to awaken, as it were, from this ordinary consciousness a different, higher consciousness, which relates to the ordinary consciousness as the ordinary consciousness relates to the sleeping consciousness. We know how the soul struggles for the strength to make a distinction between what is in reality and what is in dreams. It is necessary to awaken from the ordinary consciousness that we need for our knowledge from morning to evening to a higher consciousness, and only in this higher consciousness can we experience what is connected with the real riddles of the human soul.

Just look at the question of immortality, esteemed attendees. Today it is really placed in the quest for knowledge of people, and since people today have become accustomed to making scientific demands on such questions, no longer wanting to be satisfied with the traditional way, it is a scientific task to discuss such questions as the question of immortality. A great many people are mistaken. Many try often to somehow prove, more or less philosophically or more or less amateurishly, that something lives in the human being that outlasts death, but that is not enough, dear attendees.

One must realize: anyone who can only provide evidence that something survives death has actually done nothing special for the question of immortality. Because the question at hand is whether, when a person has discarded his physical body, a high level of consciousness is still associated with his soul essence without him living physically. All the rest are subordinate questions. For example, whether some ethereal fluid, a nebulous being, lives on as the soul, cannot interest the human being if he cannot penetrate to the realization that the continuation of life is conscious, that consciousness is possible without the organization of the body; for it is clear to spiritual science and natural science is clear that our ordinary consciousness, the everyday one, is so intimately linked with the physical life organization that one can only speak of a functioning, a powering of this ordinary consciousness when this consciousness is carried by the bodily organization.

It is therefore incumbent upon the spiritual researcher to show that consciousness is possible without physical life. Now, esteemed attendees, I would like to point out to you, so to speak, for the sake of context, some things that can support us in understanding what I am about to show, such as the knowledge of nature, even if it honestly strives to do so, can only get to a certain point in relation to the human soul and cannot go beyond it. I could give hundreds and hundreds of examples that would point in the same direction. I will give an example from literature, so that it can be verified, an example that you can find under the title 'On the Subconscious Self' by Waldstein, which was published in Wiesbaden. Waldstein cites an experience through which a kind of limit of scientific observation is revealed to him, but to the spiritual researcher much more.

He was once standing in front of a bookseller's shop window as a naturalist. His eye fell on a book that showed the title “Mollusken”. The naturalist had to smile when he looked at the title page, but was not aware of any reason to smile when he read the title of the book “Mollusken”. So he takes the following recourse to get to the bottom of the matter. He closes his eyes and pays close attention to what he can now hear, and in the distance he hears a hurdy-gurdy, which is barely playing a melody, to which the observer, who has to smile, learned to dance in very early years; he is aware that he did not pay attention to the melody at the time, only to the steps he had to learn and to what he experienced with his partner; but after decades, when he stands in front of the mollusc book, the reminiscence comes from the depths of his soul. That sound, which was not clearly absorbed at the time, comes up in the soul and causes a smile.

The spiritual researcher must pay particular attention to such things, because they show the caution that must be exercised. Many a person believes himself to be a mystic and experiences this or that through delving into the soul. What comes up is often only the long-gone organ tone, which one takes only for a deeply mystical experience, because such things also transform themselves.

Many examples could be given where mystics, who consider themselves to be very profound, tell you all kinds of things about inner experiences that take them to the boundary of the spirits and are nothing but an old hurdy-gurdy. But it is precisely in such experiences, dear attendees, that one finds the whole meaning of what human memory is. You may know that we cannot develop our self-awareness without memory. Self-awareness is very closely related to the continuous ability to remember. But the ability to remember is also one that is very often connected with the subconscious, with the so-called unconscious soul forces of our soul life. It is therefore particularly important to bear in mind that spiritual science, which seeks to penetrate into the reality of the spirit, is clear from the outset that everything that is connected with the ordinary ability to remember does not lead to knowledge of the spiritual world at all. The fact that we recognize that we are led to a certain limit, beyond which we must go if we want to enter the spiritual world, results in very specific difficulties, which are such that many people say: What a spiritual researcher says is unbelievable. This is said because what he says is very far removed from the usual thinking that people are accustomed to.

People are accustomed to thinking in such a way that everything that is carried by memory radiates into their entire mental life. I said that the spiritual researcher must have the courage to develop a different way of knowing. He can achieve this in two ways. By making himself capable of leading such a soul existence that, with the connection of memory for a period of time – you cannot be a spiritual researcher all day long – develops such strength in his soul that it determines the soul, sets it in motion, but without the ability to remember being used. How is this ability attained? It is attained through a very specific kind of meditative life. This is a kind of inner contemplation, but under very specific conditions. In our ordinary everyday consciousness, the soul power is at work in that we perceive the outer world and form our ideas about what comes to our attention. In sensory perception and in the life of imagination, that which connects us to reality on one side brings about revelation.

Those who do certain soul exercises, which are suitable for combining into one, in a sense, what is otherwise drawn together in perception and imagination, arrive at a completely different way of imagining, of knowing. To do these exercises, one must try to bring into consciousness such images that can be surveyed as completely as possible. To do this, it is necessary to be quite sure that these images cannot be drawn from ordinary or subconscious memory. Those who want to do the exercises would do well to seek advice or look for them in the literature of spiritual science. You can do it approximately, and that will lead you to your goal, but you have to make sure that you fully understand what is present in your consciousness. However, it does not have to be abstract thoughts that are symbolically connected to external reality; they should not depict anything superficial, because what is an external image is linked to memory. For example, we have to let the idea of the flooding light be present in our consciousness. And if you keep coming back to such exercises, if you bring it to the point where the whole power of the soul can concentrate in meditation on such ideas, which you fully grasp, where you are quite clear about them: only where there is no memory of what you have put together in the present will it work its way into consciousness – a kind of thinking will immediately come that at the same time encompasses what the soul has to establish against the external perceptions. One becomes blind and deaf to them, but one performs the same activity that is otherwise performed in external perceptions.

In this way one arrives at an imagination that works with the means of perception, at a kind of union of the power of perception and the power of thought. And when this is developed more and more, one notices: something arises in the soul that was not there before. You get to know new sides to people that have been slumbering in the depths of the soul, you learn to go beyond the ordinary way of thinking in the human soul nature, but the realization that 'time becomes space' occurs, the strange thing is that you can look back on what you have experienced. Ordinary memory, which is tied to ordinary day-consciousness, shows: the experience has passed; we present the experience anew by having it again in memory; we cannot look back on the experience.

When one has done such exercises, the past is present; one looks into time, a new soul ability arises, a new reality. If one is able to see the spiritual in the sensual, before one discovers that what only appears as past in the ability to remember, what can always be seen spiritually, is there, then, dear ones, one can have penetrated to this new kind of cognitive ability, then one arrives at feeling more and more, which can be described as a new self-awareness.

This new self-awareness must be experienced if one is to have even a rough idea of it. Some people rightly find lectures on spiritual science more difficult than others because our words are only shaped for the sensual and therefore our words are not very suitable for the supersensible. However, the spiritual researcher is forced to use words in a different sense than the ordinary one. He must use words through gestures, must point to what is going on in the soul. Words are gestures of the soul. He must count on the receptivity of every human soul that rests in the unconscious. In this way one arrives at a new kind of self-awareness. Only now does one get a true-to-life idea of what it means to experience oneself in one's soul and spiritual life independently of the physical organization. Why? Just as you have the table outside of you, so in this experience you have your own bodily organization outside of you. You experience yourself very certainly in a self-awareness that is independent of the bodily organization.

Now, however, a second exercise is necessary. At first, when you do such exercises, you only gain this self-awareness, and in it you feel constrained, trapped in a soul existence. It is as if you knew you had eyes, but they did not have the transparent glass liquid. You then feel the eyes within you, but you do not feel connected to the objective world through the eye. So self-awareness awakens first; but you feel as if you are in a mental haze, but you do not feel connected to the mental outside world. You know you are in it, but self-awareness must first become transparent. One arrives at this through further exercises. When one develops such thinking, which is at the same time a form of perception, one soon recognizes that one plunges into a world of images; one does not just have the new self-awareness as a basis for experiences, but lives in a world of images. It just flows towards one, but one becomes opaque in one's self-awareness.

You now have to acquire the ability to suppress the images that are flooding in through further exercises. You achieve this by strengthening your will more and more. Strengthening the will – which is usually directed outwards – in such a way that it is now directed towards one's own development, towards practising strict self-education, for example, towards seeing clearly what one has experienced, towards directing the will inwards, towards suppressing perceptions and images, towards becoming master of them in the new self-awareness; this makes it transparent and reaches the point of seeing only - although this only gives the experience - the truly spiritual world, which is just as truly there before the human soul as the world of colors is before the eye, the world of sounds before the ear. This is a world of spiritual beings and spiritual processes, to which we belong with our soul being just as we belong with our physical body to the external world perceived through the senses.

That is the way to reach the spiritual world on the one hand. This must be an experience that is based on the lack of results of mere natural science and mere mysticism. One comes to grasp the world as pure spirituality, so that one then retains a view of what I have called the past, that which lives in time. It is quite natural that one broadens one's view, extending it beyond the limits of birth or conception. As man searches up to his ancestors, looking up, so he looks through his inner soul to spiritual research, to what lived and breathed in the spiritual world before man became aware of the world. The spiritual researcher proceeds differently than the natural scientist; the spiritual researcher must show a way, not results like the natural scientist.

I have described the path that the human soul must take in a strictly regulated way in order to recognize the prenatal, spiritual, and soul aspects within itself. All speculations about immortality must ultimately lead to unsatisfactory results if one seeks the immortal as a goal to strive for. You cannot, all speculation fails. In the one path, you find the prenatal soul that lives in us and truly comes from the spiritual world, like what lives in us physically from our parents. This momentous experience becomes particularly harrowing for the soul when this soul comes to truly understand how this prenatal life, this spiritual, soul existence, is connected to the things we otherwise have around us in our ordinary consciousness.

I do not like to talk about spiritual research, about personal experiences. But all these things are personal experiences that have been taken to the point of objectivity. I must confess that one of the most harrowing experiences of my inner soul life in this area was when I once, I would say, beheld with the human thinking, the imagining, as I had practiced it as described, our prenatal human soul existence, purely spent in the spiritual world. The prenatal soul experience reveals itself through the experience. If you manage to shape your exercises more and more so that there is possibly nothing abstract about them, but rather you live completely into the image, if you manage to awaken the way you live to such liveliness, as otherwise only the experience of sensory perception is, if you live so vividly in the soul as otherwise only in sense perception, then, however strange it may be for today's thinking, the intuitive knowledge comes, then the previous earth life is experienced, the prenatal, purely spiritual life is experienced, which penetrates through the last of the thoughts, the spiritual reality, which was already its physical reality before. When a person, through the strengthening of his soul life, is able to think so powerfully that, although he perceives nothing externally, his thinking nevertheless sees the truth of the past life with the same vividness with which he otherwise looks at flowers and plants, their color and their growth, that is staggering.

A property of this clairvoyant insight, this seeing insight, is precisely the following. They have seen that a kind of insight must be developed that does not appeal to the ability to remember. Once the spiritual researcher has such an experience, he cannot remember in the ordinary sense. It is a present experience, the memory ceases. The exercises lead the spiritual researcher to the point where the memory is not appealed to even when his ideas arise; nor can he ever rely on the ordinary memory through which he looks into the spiritual world. If we want to have a second corresponding view of the spiritual world, we must not remember the view itself, but the path we took to it. This is what is terribly disappointing for beginners. They first come to spiritual experiences through exercises as set forth in my book 'How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds'. They then believe they have it as a lasting possession, but one cannot remember it and repetition is always difficult because one has to make greater efforts to have the spiritual vision again.

I have described certain exercises to you, through which the soul comes into a completely different state, through which a different kind of knowledge is developed, through which one becomes able to look into the eternal of the human soul. Something else is connected with these exercises. When one has really gone through the preparatory paths, experienced the limitations of natural knowledge and mysticism, when one has really gone through all this in one's soul, one comes to the point where one gradually says to oneself: You still have to make more efforts to come to a completely different kind of soul organization. You then have to progress further by developing the exercises into something that, in a sense, enlightens you about certain things, an inner experience that is connected to other experiences you have in nature knowledge and mysticism. One feels separated from what is inwardly pure in the body – in mysticism – the basis of thinking, feeling, willing, and imagining. That is the peculiar thing. When one does such exercises, one is also brought closer to material life, and by seeing through it, one's spiritual life is clarified.

We have certain concepts of what imagination is, of how we form ideas. But how many conscientious investigations have been made to discover how this thinking, which has perceptions, is connected to the body? Through the exercises I have described, one comes to be, so to speak, closer to one's soul, mind and physical body.

Imagination is experienced in a different way, dear audience. By developing ideas and thoughts, the brain experiences a hunger, and then you experience that it was truly too simplistic a conception of how popular Darwinism views the human organization. It is not so; man is a complicated being, and there are certain states of equilibrium and disequilibrium between his individual organs. If they are capable of thought, our brain will certainly come into such a state that it is in retrograde motion, that it hungers, and without the brain, while the other body is in normal nutrition, is less nourished, is in greater hunger, no alert thought life can develop.

This is also connected with something that can always be verified. Certain people who seek mystical experiences in the wrong way begin to starve themselves. They want to starve the whole body and also starve the brain, which is already hungrier than the other limbs. Through purely spiritual exercises one comes to the realization that the feeling of hunger is necessary in the human brain organization. This leads to the realization that the soul and spiritual life can truly live and exist in its independence through our brain nerves, because we do not develop the life of the organ for thinking and imagining; we degrade it and interrupt the life of the organ. What constitutes animal physical life, we must degrade, not develop, in order to have thoughts and ideas. In the nervous system, space must be made for independent, spiritual, and soul life. Science will come to this very soon. The beginnings are already there that the physical organization of man itself is such that one must admit the independent spiritual soul life. The brain undermines the sprouting life, making room for the development of the spiritual.

The other thing is to get to know the other pole of the human organization. Just as brain life is one pole – see the last chapter on the “Soul Mysteries” – the other pole is the life that is connected with its ability to move as physical life with its will. Man is not organized as simply as ordinary natural science believes. While the brain is atrophied in waking life, another pole of its organization is overdeveloped. The sprouting, burgeoning life beyond the normal limit is what is connected with the extremity of things, with arm, hand, foot, leg. But not only with the outer feet, legs, but also with the continuation into the inner being.

What is connected with this other pole of human organization is not felt in the same way as in the feeling of hunger, but is felt in oversaturation, in survival. It is felt in such a way that, while the human being, in his bodily and nervous life, as it were, returns to the normal organization of his trunk life, he has waking visions and perceptions as a result. The outer organs are overgrown. One need only see the anatomical and physiological connection between the extremities and the other human organs to recognize the physical connection with human reproductive capacity. This corresponds to a spiritual-soul element. The nerve organ is experienced as normal malnutrition.

In the will organ lives as spiritual-soul that which, if it is to be developed, is developed in such a way that one does different exercises. They consist of subjecting the emotional and will life to rules, as was done earlier with the life of perception and imagination. If one looks at something that is not usually looked at in everyday life, then the goal is achieved. One can remember with full clarity what one has experienced; in one's memory, one perceives what one has experienced, including other thoughts that one has had; one does not remember moods or states of mind in the same way.

But this must be trained. Man must train not only those soul abilities that otherwise lead to memory, but also the overview of such things, such as saying to oneself: I was once 17 years old and must be able to visualize the soul conditions that I had at that time. The moods of the soul come up again; one finds how one can follow such moods between birth and present life, one overlooks one's moods. Something develops – one can compare it to inner soul music. Just as in music the preceding tone blends with the following tone, so earlier soul moods resonate in a peculiar way into later ones, and later ones also resonate back into the earlier ones. One recognizes how one develops, how the earlier parts of one's soul life bear fruit later. One must look at oneself in that way in which one otherwise does not look at oneself, what lives in man like the germ that lives in future years, will live in this year's plant. What lives in man goes beyond his individuality, the other link of immortality that goes beyond death. One must recognize immortality as one recognizes the second side. Just as one recognizes the first side through imagination and perception, so one can only see what one becomes in the afterlife by developing one's emotional and will life. This is how one develops other will abilities.

The ability to remember must be suppressed while one is a spiritual researcher. While we have to suppress it in spiritual science, only looking at the present, suppressing memory, the ability to love, the emotional and volitional life will increase inwardly; in the moments where the human being wants to penetrate into the spiritual world after death, his greater capacity for love will also be developed, and it must be developed, otherwise the human being would look into the spiritual world as a guest, and that would be evil. The capacity for love is increased, the capacity for memory recedes.

Twenty-five years ago, I began to philosophically explore the ability to love in connection with the problem of human freedom. At the time, in “The Philosophy of Freedom”, I had to break, so to speak, with the popular sayings regarding love. It is always said that “love makes people blind”; I believe I can rightly assert that true love ability makes people clairvoyant, leads people right into the depths of the loved one. However, ordinary love is very often only connected with a certain selfishness. We love another, foreign being, but we often want to have it differently, find fault with it, we want to make of the being what we wanted to see. That is not yet love, which is actually worthy of the highest sense of the name. It is only truly present when one forgets oneself.

The spiritual researcher must take self-forgetfulness so far that self-awareness is developed outside the body. This increases the ability to love, and we come to not only really see through the other human being in selfless love with clairvoyance, but also to perform actions that do not come from our urges, instincts, or what we desire, but rather come from pure love for the action, from the insightful love that an action must happen, that we completely exclude ourselves when we want to. If we act only out of love for the action, then we approach such an ability of love, which still has to be increased by practice – [see my] “Knowledge of Higher Worlds”. One arrives at developing a soul ability that is capable of truly seeing. Man also has something in him spiritually, soulfully, that also goes beyond the physical, that which passes through the death of man.

One can only understand human immortality by really understanding the other state of consciousness, by experiencing in a certain way every day, the consciousness that is not dependent on the physical organization, that becomes independent of the physical experience. It looks at conditions before birth, after death, because it knows itself in an elevated self-awareness outside the body. In this way, the eternal essence of the human being is seen together with insight into the pre-birth and after-death.

The soul must be explored in two directions if the human being wants to see immortality. Immortality cannot be seen scientifically by expanding and broadening one's knowledge, but by acquiring a new way of knowing. It should be noted that this only applies to those times when a person wants to engage in spiritual research. One cannot be a spiritual researcher from awakening to falling asleep; one devotes oneself to it intermittently, for moments that one creates in full consciousness. Then one finds those times when one is in the spiritual world in such contrast to one's ordinary consciousness, as one's daytime consciousness is in contrast to one's sleep consciousness.

It must be emphasized that this is never the right way to spiritual research, when a person, in a self-satisfied, egotistical way, tries to bring into their ordinary life, into the life of their duties, of healthy thinking and healthy coexistence with people, what should only apply in moments when they are devoting themselves to spiritual research. Just as we need to sleep well so that we can live during the day and develop a healthy, conscious life, so we need to live responsibly, fully consciously, mindful of our obligations in ordinary life, not in a false abstraction from life, not in fantasies, in frippery with which one might adorn oneself. A healthy life in the world of the senses is just as necessary for a healthy contemplation of the spiritual world as healthy sleep is necessary for a healthy day life.

It is not necessary for everyone to become a spiritual researcher, although it can be seen in the books mentioned that everyone can convince themselves of the truth of what I have stated today, that everyone can quickly acquire spiritual research skills today. One can, but does not have to. If you put aside all prejudices and want to do for this matter what humanity had to do to accept Copernicanism, you will also develop thinking habits that are quite natural to people and through which common sense can understand what the spiritual researcher has to say, although you cannot prove whether an astronomer is right. You can't do that here either.

This spiritual research, as described here, is something that the present must truly assimilate in the near future. This spiritual development could learn from the unspeakably bitter experiences of the last three or four years, where we can go with our old familiar ideas. Today, far too many people are still too lazy to ask themselves how much part our ideas, which are no longer suited to contemporary life, play in our catastrophic times. In the knowledge of nature, man has such ideas: spiritual, ethical, social and political ideas. If we want to apply the model of knowledge gained from nature to social, ethical and political life, man can only do so if he rises in spirit to grasp the laws that prevail in the spiritual world. For the most important questions in life, for that which the most severe and most deeply invasive events demand, thoughts are necessary that delve into reality, but not just into sensual reality, which is one that is imbued with spirit everywhere. Those who deny that another spiritual world lives within our world, as one looks at it, make the same mistake as those who say that a horseshoe is a horseshoe, and it is in reality a magnet.

Thus spiritual research discovers spiritual reality in the world that is available to us, and through this we learn to intervene in the full reality. But this has become most necessary in our time. We must consciously experience, and allow people to experience, that impulses from our ethical and social history are also interventions. Therefore, spiritual research emphasizes that humanity has struggled to achieve what it calls logical thinking. Today, many people can think logically. But thinking in accordance with reality is what will have as great an impact on human spiritual development as Copernicanism once did. Even if what the spiritual sciences have to say has, in a sense, lasting significance, the spiritual researcher may also, especially in today's world, say what he has to bring out of the deeper reality as a result of the times, which has always been between the lines. We must look to the past, especially to the very recent past. It stands before us questioningly, telling us images, thoughts, ideas, impulses of will; it shows us through events that it has outlived itself. We must look to the future, which we can only master by standing in a different way in the place where we stand through destiny. We must look into the future by looking at the full reality, so that by seizing it we may seek to penetrate the historical, ethical life of mankind as it must be penetrated, as man must intervene. The spiritual researcher may say that he wants to serve human knowledge, human life in time, where such difficulties are being experienced as now, and still he adds hope, he believes that he can serve our difficult time and the difficult future of humanity in particular.

If we wish to be convinced of what, in the newer sense of the word, Natural Science signifies, we must look back to the sources of our present civilization. As can be seen even front the ordinary historical and scientific observation, these sources must be thought of as lying very far back in time, it is only if one keeps in mind the evolution of man and the gradual appearance of his special powers in more recent times that one can set-how these powers arose front the depths of the human soul, powers which lead to the present observation of nature and the affiliation of this to technique and to life.

There is a certain difficulty in placing more recent historical epochs in their essence before anyone who is wedded to the present day Science. In the previous lecture we attempted by way of introduction to proceed from the present—a present be it understood to which Herder and Goethe belong and to investigate certain streams which lead back to ancient times. We have seen how one of these two streams which existed so characteristically in Goethe led its hack to the Egyptian point of view, the other to the Chaldean. We went back to pre-Christian times and emphasized characteristic distinctions between the soul mood of the Chaldean people living in further Asia which can be traced back to about the beginning of the third pre-Christian millennium and that of Egypt, which can be studied still further back even in external history.

We have seen how a view existed among the Chaldeans belonging more to the external world in which the human mind so lost itself in the external world that even time became elastic. This soul mood made it necessary to regard the day hours in summer longer than in winter, whereas with the Egyptians the division of the year throughout the centuries was held rigidly by a method of calculating and not from any grasp of external events. They reckoned 365 days to the year and went on in stages of 365 days, not noticing that in reality they were no longer in harmony with the course of the year as it ran in the sense world externally. While they reckoned the year shorter than it is they encountered contradictions with what is really perceived in the outer world. This shows a significant distinction in the soul moods of two people who were connected with each other through trade relations and by spiritual intercourse, people who stood near to each other outwardly. One can only value such a distinction correctly by entering deeply into the origins of human civilization. This is rendered increasingly difficult because the civilizations which have developed one after the other in time exist to-day side by side in space arrested at different phases of evolution.

If to-day the European or the American who wishes to emerge from his materialism to more spiritual ideas about the human being, if he turn to the present Indian civilization, he finds within this a highly developed spirituality, a mysticism penetrated by acute intellectual concepts. He finds within its philosophy absolutely nothing of what he has learnt to know as the natural scientific view of Western or American civilization. If he feel a longing to experience something concerning humanity, something which modern science cannot give him, and if he do not allow himself to take into consideration what a newer spiritual science can give concerning man, then he will seek to absorb himself in the spiritual view of modern India or at least of what has been preserved from an epoch that is relatively not very ancient.

Whoever is armed with spiritual science, however, and approaches this Indian view of the world will find that from what exists in it to-day or what has been preserved historically from a more or less far distant past, there is expressed something which is no longer quite apparent but which seems to be a kind of lower stratum, as something springing up from dark depths. This plays even into the language and especially into the ideas and images. It must be conceived as something which has undergone many transformations before it has reached its present form. What exists in modern India has only received its form in most recent times but it carries elements in itself which are primaeval, which have required thousands of years in order to be what they have become.

If we turn to other civilizations, the Western Asiatic or the Chinese for instance, we find that something similar is the case; but we have the feeling that we need not go back so far in order to understand the present as we have to do in India. And if we observe Egyptian life as it transpired since about the beginning of the third pre-Christian millennium, we have the feeling that what is contained historically in documents is such that we are obliged to immerse ourselves into most ancient times, as we attempted to do, for example, in the last lecture. But we also find that the old has been preserved there with a kind of purity so that its fundamental depth is apparent even in later times, whereas in India it must be sought in the outset of its development.

In a similar way this is the case with the Greek and with our own civilization which, as we shall see, begins about the fifteenth century. The matter so appears that for a penetrating view, primeval elements have continued but are hardly noticeable to ordinary observation.

We will now see how the ancient elements within European and American civilizations are to be discussed.

One might say that the natural scientific element which has entered recent civilization appears to have so thoroughly cleared away what was old that this old element can only be substantiated by definite methods. It is however still there. There exist side by side on earth civilizations of different ages. One must go far back in time in order to understand modern Indian civilization, not so far back to understand the civilizations and literature of Western Asia, still less far back for the Egyptian and again still less to understand the Greco-Roman culture. One can remain almost entirely in the present in seeking to understand modern European and American civilization.

What has developed consecutively in the course of time stands side by side for us now and what stands side by side thus is in reality of varying ages, at least so far as regards external appearances. The temporal is mingled with the spacial and one must first find from a modern standpoint the methods which show from what present day civilizations one can go back into ancient times and from which one can find access to these old times by difficult and devious paths.

Now as you know, the observation of natural science, the so-called anthropological or geological observation, joins on to what history furnishes and we saw in the last lecture how superficially this is often done. We are led back into very early European times by superficial anthropological investigation. Of course there is less said about the people of Asia but as regards European evolution we are led back into ancient epochs. You know that geology, enriched by modern anthropology and history, says that, concerning certain trustworthy artistic remains which have been found in caves in Spain and France, very ancient races of Europe date back thousands of years; that in these extraordinary paintings revealed by the cave explorations we are told how in ancient times men must have lived in Europe in a certain degree of civilization even before that significant event spoken of by anthropology and geology as the European ice-age within which a great part of the European continent was covered with ice and thus made uninhabitable. Such regions as those in which the cave explorations of Southern France and Spain have been undertaken, must have been oases. Amid the wide ice fields men must have dwelt: a relatively rich nature must have existed and a civilization have evolved.

Thus are we led back even to-day into very ancient times of European life. And here, what external investigation can furnish joins on to what Spiritual Science has to say. Spiritual Science can indeed only proceed from what the developed soul powers of man can fathom, what can result from imagination and inspiration; it can speak of what can be consciously per-ceived inwardly. One can say in referring to what external history can investigate: Spiritual Science can in reality only fathom more or less the spiritual part of evolution, least of all that which has occurred in external nature. However, through spiritual investigation one can go back to those epochs which have seen man and his environment in quite different relations to those of the European ice-age.

It will be the task of these lectures to go back to those ancient times when man lived under quite different relationships and in quite different regions of the earth than later; but a feeling ought to be evoked regarding how justified it is to point to a supersensible cognition which traces back the history of human evolution into early times.

If anyone whose soul life, deepened through the view and feeling gained from spiritual science, approaches what outer history gives, he can have experience of the evolutionary path of civilized man. One can admit from the point of view of external anthropology and geology and history, that if one goes back ten to fifteen thousand years one finds quite another kind of life than that of modern civilized Europe. One can admit that in this epoch, during the last ten to fifteen thousand years, the evolution of European, Asiatic and eventually also of ancient American humanity takes place.

But what lies in documents must be illumined in a special manner by spiritual science. One must of course say that out of such considerations as I discussed by way of introduction, if one has acquired the possibility of going back from the present into earlier soul-moods one can then perceive correctly that which exists side by side.

In relation to antiquity, attention must be given first of all to the region of India. What is still there to-day as an extraordinary acute method of interpreting the world leads back to the times of the mighty Indian philosophy in which the Vedas had birth. But even if we let the Vedas, the Vedanta philosophy, the Yoga philosophy of India affect us we feel that in order to understand what, in its after effects, still exists beside us on Earth, we feel that we must go back into very early times indeed. If we compare it with, for example, our European method of thinking logically or with the Greek method of building up thoughts, we then find that the European culture of to-day, when compared with the Indian, appears like a descendant, like a grandchild, a child living beside his father and contemporary with him. Indian culture stands there reflecting very early times, but it has become old. In its old age condition one can still fathom what was revealed in ancient times as the highest spirituality, but one only sees it in decadence, in its old age. One sees it as one can see in the child certain early conditions of its father but these are changed because the conditions are experienced in a later date. Think of a man, for example, who was a child in the ninetieth year of the nineteenth century and then turn from him to his father or grandfather. The grandfather was a child in the fortieth or fiftieth year of the nineteenth century but he went through childhood in different conditions to those of the ninetieth year. The child of the latter time knows quite different things to what his grandfather knew with his naïve childhood in the fortieth year. If one acquire this kind of insight into the development of peoples, the present European civilization or even that of Greece appears, so far as we can penetrate into them, as if born late compared with what was born earlier in India or what to-day we find ancient in it. If we can sense this India which has grown old, which was already old at the time of the Vedas and Vedanta philosophy, if we can penetrate this in our mood of soul trained through spiritual science in order to see the earlier from out of the later just as one sees the childhood in a man who has become old, then we can arrive at a perception of primaeval India. But then we must realize that this primaeval India was without doubt a civilization fundamentally different from our own. It must have been absolutely permeated by the spirit and have comprehended man in a special, spiritual way. And if one observes the manifold character of what we find in India, the Veda poems with their imagery which remains however in a fluidic element, the acute Vedanta philosophy, the fervent Yoga philosophy, one must say that in the course of time civilization must have mingled with civilization there; that once upon a time a primaeval civilization of a thoroughly spiritual kind must have existed there.

Then something less spiritual was drawn over this, something which found its expression in the Vedas. What appears in the fervent Yoga philosophy was then founded. It was impossible that all these could have arisen out of one race. Different peoples with different capacities have intermingled. The one brought the teachings of Yoga, the other the Veda poems. These peoples already found a primeval India which they absorbed and from which they took what was ripe and old and had withered in man. The incoming race came with fresh blood; they fashioned that which men in decadence could develop no further. And so it went on.

In this way the present condition gradually arose and one is not far wrong in comparing this primaeval Indian culture with those remnants which exist in the regions where modern civilization has developed. We can compare with the men of primaeval India those who painted the extraordinary pictures in the west of Europe, the lines of which make such a deep impression on us. When we look at these pictures, if we can lose ourselves in what the human soul experienced while producing these pictures, we must say: certainly, something very primitive is contained here, often something like that which modern precocious children paint; but yet there is something else. We see from these pictures how men lived with a love for outer nature and we see that these pictures were painted from out of deep inner impulses. We see that they were painted by men who did not first analyse with the eye so as to decide how they should draw lines or place colours but who fashioned and painted from out of their inner experience what was deeply rooted in their love.

If one compares this with what was founded in the civilization of primeval India, one finds a relationship.

In Western Europe the development is primitive and it remains primitive; over in Southern Asia it evolves further and further because it is continually fructified by other races and it develops right on to the Vedanta philosophy. If I had brought these facts forward, as I have often done, in a spiritual scientific way you would then see that one can approach the matter concretely but quite differently. I now present them as they appear to the spiritual scientist when he takes external documents into consideration. But one cannot approach these matters, as customary to-day, with crude ideas acquired from a crude natural scientific observation. Our ideas must be pliable and plastic, as you will see from the considerations I will now place before you. Naturally one cannot show the connection between the cave civilization of Western Europe and the Indian as one proves the similarity of triangles, but the certainty we attain is not little if we only penetrate these things and if we adopt that soul-mood to which attention has been drawn.

He who deepens his soul life—from this point of view in the wonderful ideas of the Vedanta philosophy, sees these transformed into an abstract spirit in the draughtsmanship of those paintings in the caves of Spain and Southern France. It does not appear striking, therefore, even from external investigation, that spiritual science explains how a common primaeval race, which must be sought for in the eighth pre-Christian millennium, gradually spread over the inhabitable regions of Europe, Africa and Asia and developed according to the different relationships of life. This ancient civilization within which man lived united to outer nature, showed itself in its most gifted form in ancient India. Here was revealed what comes to expression otherwise in a primitive way only.

There was developed also farther that which has astounded people, for instance in the culture of Crete. This arose in the east of Europe. In India it developed as the primaeval Indian culture, and progressed further and further, remaining capable of life even in its old age. It passed through its blossom in that epoch when the Vedas, the Vedanta philosophy and other philosophical methods of thought arose. A great many things intermingled in this India which developed at different times but which are there to-day side by side.

If we attend particularly to primeval Indian civilization we must say that everything points to a humanity with a soul mood into which we cannot enter through external means.

I have said that one can press forward to Imaginative Cognition. If one does this consciously one gets an idea of what such men experienced, not consciously yet but instinctively like the ancient Chaldeans or the later Egyptians. Their mood of soul was absolutely different from that of modern men.

Through this advance in Imaginative Cognition man himself becomes a picture; he blends with this picture and thus lives into the 'becoming' (das Werden) of the world. Thus did the Chaldeans for example, live in the 'becoming.' But on the other hand one learns to know also when to rise to Inspiration, how to overcome the separation between the inwardly subjective and the outwardly objective; to feel at one with the cosmic all, to so feel one's being in the Cosmos that one can say: What announces itself through me is the voice, the speech of the Cosmos itself. I only give myself to it in order to be an organ in the Cosmos and to let the world reveal itself through me. We can reach this state consciously in Inspiration.

The Egyptian lived in it instinctively in a late stage. This leads us back to times from out of which a relatively good document obtains in Chinese civilization. What is usually described as such is a late product, but just as in India ancient stages, child stages reveal themselves so are revealed in China primaeval stages of civilization. We can feel how an instinctive Inspiration lives in the Chinese civilization. Through spiritual science we obtain to-day a conscious Inspiration, in China it was more or less instinctive; which means that its results exist as a background in what is imparted to-day in Chinese literature. We are led back to a view of man which presents him as a member of the entire Cosmos.

Just as we speak to-day of a three-fold man, the head man, the member man, and the rhythmic man, and fathom his being in its full depths through Inspiration, in the same way the ancestors of the Chinese civilization once lived in an inspired knowledge of something similar. This however did not relate itself to man because man was only a member of the entire Cosmos but it related itself directly to the Cosmos. Just as we feel conscious of our head, the Chinese felt what he called 'Yang.' If we wish to contemplate our head especially we cannot look at it, we can at most see the tip of our nose if we turn our eyes that way. As we can see the surface portions of our organism when we regard ourselves outwardly but are only conscious of our head to a certain extent in our mind, in the same way the Chinese was conscious of something which he called Yang. And by this Yang he conceived what was to be found above, what spread itself out spiritually; the heavenly, the shining, the producing, the active, the giving. And he did not distinguish himself from what he knew as his head, from this Yang.

Again, as we distinguish man from his environment when we feel the 'member-man' placing us in activity and connecting us with our environment, similarly the Chinese speak of 'Yin,' and in this he points to what is dark, what is earthy, receptive, and so on.

We say to-day that in our limb and digestive system we take up external substances, uniting these through this system with our own being, and we take up the senses-thought element through our head organization, but between these two stands everything which maintains rhythm of breath; the rhythm of blood brings this about. As we feel and cognize man, in the same way the Chinese once saw the whole Cosmos: above the creative, illumining, heavenly; below the earthy, dark, receptive; and the equilibrium between the two, that which forms a rhythm between heaven and earth, that he felt when the clouds appeared in the sky, when the rain fell and when it evaporated, when the plants grew out of the earth towards the heavens. In all this he felt the rhythm of above and below and he called this 'Tao.' Thus he had a view of that with which he grew. It presented itself to him in this three-fold way. But he did not distinguish himself from all this.

This view meets us transformed in Western Asia. What is transmitted to us as a primaeval civilization from the region of Persia, what shows itself in China, this must have once undergone a quite different development, metamorphosed into what is given as the opposition between Ahura Mazdao and Ahriman; Ahura Mazdao the illuminating, radiating God of Light and the dark, gloomy Ahriman, between whom the world is represented as running its course.

The early Indian could not yet distinguish the higher from the lower, heaven from earth, and this is the difference between what was early Indian and what in China was metamorphosed entirely and can be found as the basis for many civilizations in further Asia that I have named the early Persian in my book Occult Science. As yet no difference was spoken about between what was subjective and inward in men and what was outward and objective. In the outer world no distinction was made between what is light spiritually and what inclines to be more bodily dark, while in later times, in the early Persian epoch, the two were distinguished from each other. The interchange of activity between the two was thought of as being brought about through Tao or through some rhythmic equilibrium.

What is it that now took place? Why did men forsake the old standpoint so that they could no longer distinguish the spiritually light from the physically dark and for what reason did they go over to the conception of so opposite an idea as that of polarity or duality?

When we realize what is to be found in documents and when we let the feeling which lies in these documents and in their tradition act upon our souls, we come to the knowledge that in those olden times men played little part in the outer world. They lived mostly, from our own correct point of view, on a high spiritual plane, but on the other hand also, in animal innocence. For everything that they experienced in relation to the universe was instinctive. Later on this was thought of as being the out-breathing of Brahma.

All this was only possible to men who did not take part and work actively in outer nature, but who entered into nature, one might say, as does an animal, as a bird that takes what nature offers for nourishment without first working for it; fetching it merely by flight. These men therefore lived in full harmony with all the kingdoms of nature and extended their love over them all.

When with full human understanding we place ourselves within all existence we realize directly that what was love of animals and plants in the Indian-oriental view of life has arisen out of the great all-love' that does not harm any being and therefore has not yet attained to the fully awakened human consciousness in which men lived in later days. They lived in an atmosphere of spirituality which was instinctive but was higher than that of the Greeks or of the spirituality of today. They lived blameless in nature: they did not kill, they even regarded the plants on which they lived in such a way that they did not sow them but took only those that grew wild.

In such a way one looks back upon the peopling of the southern Asiatic regions thousands of centuries ago.

Later there awoke in men the consciousness of the radical difference between the higher and lower, a consciousness of the spiritual which man cannot alter, which is above the physical upon which he can work and to which he can devote himself.

About the beginning of the 6th or 5th millennium B.C. a change takes place—one can trace it in decadent remnants—in which what surrounded men and what they could alter is looked upon differently and as something over which they could exercise lordship. They begin to tame animals, they make domestic animals out of wild animals, and they become agriculturists.

From the 7th or 6th millennium B.C. is the time of great radical change when men begin to work upon Nature and thus distinguish Nature from that which is radiant and shines upon what they could affect and what can gain form through humanity. But it is not only men that can give form to things: men can make instruments, a primitive axe was the instrument that preceded the plough—probably it was woman who first pursued agriculture—they ploughed the ground by hand, and sowed. But just as man saw that the earth could gain form through him he saw also that it was not through him that in spring the earth is decked out with plants and that in autumn the plants disappear. And therefore as the earth can acquire form through man, form also comes from what illumines him from out of surrounding space, and he comes to the distinguishing of light and darkness, spirit and matter.

All this developed in such a way that men first learnt to distinguish themselves from the outer world through labouring on the land and being agriculturists and through breeding cattle. We can see in later Persian culture how everything depended on agriculture. We can see the connexion of this with what is expressed in the Avesta and we can recognize the progress from the early Indian civilization. But this develops in such a way that man does not as yet know himself as a Self. Humanity identifies itself with the external world. Men on the whole are entirely instinctively inspirational and they pass from instinctive inspiration to an understanding of the soul life which in after times, in the beginning of the third millennium, appears as the Chaldean imaginative civilization of which we can say that men have progressed so far that they not only distinguish the higher from the lower but that they occupy themselves with the stars; that they invent instruments, water-timepieces, etc. If however we study the Chaldeans we will find everywhere how strongly mankind lives in the outer world and that it is difficult for an inner life to be acquired.

In Egypt we see something different. We see the Chaldean arising later than the Egyptian. We can follow the Egyptian back to the time in which we can also set the early Persian civilization with its metamorphosing of the Chinese culture, to the time when the higher and the lower were differentiated. But we can see, just in the beginning of the third millennium B.C., a mighty and radical change within the culture of Egypt. Just as we saw a similar radical change when taming animals and agriculture began, so do we see in the third millennium a still more extensive change. We come upon it in this way. We see how in Egypt the building of pyramids developed in a later period. We can also follow Egyptian culture historically to-day further back than the pyramids. These begin in the third millennium. Egyptian civilization reaches back to the time of Menes before this century. The mighty pyramids were not built then. At the same time that the pyramids were built we see something arising in Egypt which points in a conspicuous way to the fact that the Egyptians experienced intensely an inward development of consciousness. In order to build these pyramids powerful instruments must without doubt have existed. Such instruments could have only arisen through some kind of metal work and this working with metals implies a certain knowledge of the inner nature of metal . We see what was later named chemical knowledge arising in a primitive form with the Egyptians, in other words, we see how men began to make their inner nature strongly active and how they did not yet know that this inner nature was there.

How mankind became aware of this inner nature and its strength can best be recognized by us when we examine from a definite point of view the highly developed Egyptian art of healing. It is quite different from our own medical science. For the illnesses existing in Egypt there were specialists, eye specialists in particular. The healers there made use of the so called Temple sleep. The sick were brought to the Temple and put into a kind of sleep during which they entered a sort of dream condition. What they then remembered was studied in its pictorial characteristics by priests who were versed in such things. These priests found out what taught them pathology through the inner dramatic course of the dreams, through the character of the pictures, whether they were dark on light or dark following light and so on. From another side they discovered indications for remedies in the particular configuration of the dreams. Through observation of what men experienced inwardly and what in dream pictures presented itself to the inner sight, the inward bodily condition of human beings was studied in Egypt.

We see this occurring parallel with what was developing in Chaldea. There men lived more in an external outlook. They invented instruments, their wonderful water clocks for instance evolved from the pictorial character of their souls. They were so immersed in the pictorial element that they looked upon time as transmutable pictures. This picture making element was like an outward one in which they lived. With the Egyptian this element was grasped inwardly, it was so taken that they studied it in dream form. We see here an epoch when men did not feel themselves merely as members of the universe but in which they raised themselves out of the world and individualized themselves in these two ways in the Chaldean and the Egyptian. And we see an evolution in the arising of the pictorial observation of instinctive imagination. In a twofold way this meets us, the one in Chaldea, the other in Egypt. And in the beginning of the building of the pyramid, which in its measurements and geometric relations rests on a perception of proportions in the development of man, on the development of inner forces and on the experiencing of these forces, we see a third epoch of culture in which instinctive imagination gives a definite tint to the evolution of man.

And we see how in this time the social conditions became the natural result of what arose as soul conditions. If we study the social conditions of primeval India we will find that men lived in peace together.

We see in primaeval Persia how a warlike element existed, since there it was that men took up the fight with Nature, and we see how this warlike instinct went over into their imagination. And since they were possessed inwardly, since this instinctive inward possession of men in relation to themselves can only be what is emotional and of the will, those impulses for power showed themselves in the grotesque and great pyramids which are resting places for the dead and at the same time serve as testimonies of the outer power of those who ruled. We see how consciousness of power wells up but also how other folk mix with them bringing new blood into what existed as imaginative, instinctive, in the social conditions also. We see how such stock come more from out of central Asia and mix with the others. What they bring belongs to what is a feeling of 'themselves-now-men,' distinct from their environment.

In Egypt there arose in a definite period what made the Egyptian realize himself as a godlike human being: he felt his self-consciousness so strongly that he looked upon all other people as barbarians and as human only those people who could live in inner pictures. One can see thus arising an intensified value of self-consciousness which runs parallel with an event belonging to this spiritual condition.

If we study the laws of Hammurabi we find that the horse is not yet included among the domesticated animals. It came into civilized life, however, very soon after. Hammurabi speaks of the ass and the ox and soon after his time the horse is named in documents the 'mountain ass.' It was so called because it was brought over from the mountainous East. Races that had penetrated into Chaldea brought the horse with them and with this a war-like element appeared. We see the war-like element, born in olden times, developed further when the horse is tamed and added to the other tamed animals. This also is connected with a certain condition of the soul. One can say that up to this period man had not mounted a horse and strengthened his individuality to a certain extent through fettering the horse to his own movement. The point of development in which he now was awake expressed itself as the pictorial perception of the Chaldean and as the inner dreamlike life of the Egyptian. In this way the external relations of human evolution are intimately connected with the metamorphosis of the soul in the succeeding epochs: on one side the building of the pyramids, on the other the taming of the horse. Regarded externally they express the third epoch of culture, the Chaldean-Egyptian; and these are intimately connected with the arising of the instinctive-imaginative life.

The highly developed civilisation of Egypt at the period in which the pyramids were built expressed itself in a dreamlike imagination. It came to a close relatively early.

We see the first dawn at the beginning of the third millennium. After it had begun to decline its soul mood lived on in Asia, progressing through Western Asia, Asia Minor and over to the European continent. It is clearly perceptible in what comes over from Asia Minor from the older Greek civilization and is still perceptible in the Homeric poems and in their outlook on the world. But in the approach to these Homeric poems we come upon a radical transformation. What lies at their base as a world outlook shows imaginative ideas throughout and also the perception of man which is pictorial.

In order to understand Homer's own peculiar method, one must see plastically with the inner eye of the soul when, apart from the fact that he speaks in pictures that can be seen outwardly of an Achilles or a Hector, he points out the pictorial element, as for example, 'the quick footed Achilles, Hector the hero with the waving crest.' In the whole nature of Homer we see something that is Chaldean.

This becomes different as the Greek civilisation develops which we find with Aeschylus and Sophocles and in the Greek sculpture. We can distinguish this from what is older because we realise how strong was the impulse in Greece to understand man in his own actual human nature.

If we look at the Chaldeans we see how the plastic perception appeared there in images and we see it especially in one of those races which were near to the Chaldeans locally, the Sumerians. We see how this race tends like the Egyptian towards the outward aspect of humanity. We find among the Greeks in drama and also where drama is led over into the domain of sculpture, how man is to be understood in his outward aspect. This was strongly felt by the man of the third epoch in his expression of deep, instinctive forces. This happened in Egypt during the building of the pyramids when, in their structure, men allowed their forces to grow into gigantic proportions; and in certain races of Asia who lived in an especially warlike way and placed themselves on horseback and felt themselves one with the horse.

The Greek then proceeded to say: 'I do not require external means, all human forces lie within my skin.' And he fashioned plastically those forms of men, perfect in themselves, which take everything into themselves which a previous epoch had to seek through an external embodiment. This entire immersion of oneself, this entire living in what is human and this seeking for the sublime in man, this we find expressed in the Greek spirit. And we meet it later in another form in Rome if we call to mind the passing through the Forum of the Emperor or some other figures in the Roman toga. We can see even to-day how in a much more abstract way than in Greece there was this fashioning of men with the highest forces felt within their bodies.

In the sixth pre-Christian century a new epoch begins; the Homeric age being still earlier. This age which now begins develops especially strong and powerful in Greece where it increases in splendour for about four centuries and then meets with a downfall.

Then Christianity arises. When the Greek had his Zeus statue before him he still felt something fully living there, but when the Roman regarded his statues he saw fundamentally only an abstract idea. This abstraction be came more and more pronounced and even in the fourth post-Christian century when the Senators entered the Roman Senate Hall each one threw a grain of incense into the glowing flame which burned in front of the statue of Victory, before he took his seat as Senator. We see how that which was felt in Greece as the fulness of life in the statues of Zeus, Athene and Apollo is still felt in the statue though in a merely abstract thought form, which was however real. There was still something like the magic weaving of divine forces themselves in the Zeus and Athene statues.

We then see how the Christian Emperor Constantine had this statue removed out of the Senate Hall because he thought it had lost all meaning in the sight of Christianity. And we see how Julian the Apostate once again absorbs himself in the fully human view of the fourth epoch, bringing back again the statue of Victory to the Senate Hall; how he causes the ancient ceremonies to be enacted again by the Senators but how he can no more renew the old and how he succumbs as a consequence. For the arrow which struck him down was the arrow of a murderer hired by his enemies.

And out of all this the epoch develops which I shall have to characterize further, the epoch in which men occupy themselves with inner spirituality, with intellectuality, with the power of understanding. This develops in its own special way through the Middle Ages where the intellect was thought about as we find it in Scholasticism where men fought over Nominalism and Realism.

In the 15th century a quite different spirit leads over to the age of Natural Science. In the beginning this spirit was specially strongly developed in Galileo and Copernicus who brought about the great progress in human consciousness which might be called 'interiorization' as compared with Greek consciousness. It may be so called in spite of having developed during the 18th century into that materialism which in the 19th century revealed so much with regard to external nature.

To-day we stand at a great turning point. I do not want to bring forward epoch fantasies like those of Spengler but I wish to say something different. In the beginning of the Egyptian age we see the first stage of human understanding arising, how the age of the pyramids began and how this stage was announced through other symptoms. We see how the next stage begins in the eighth pre-Christian century, how it develops in Greece and in Rome in the soul mood which understands 'man as man,' how this age comes to an end and the 'interiorization' of the intellect begins in the fifteenth century.

Thus we look back upon three great turning points: the point where the Egyptian-Chaldean epoch begins, we see how the Greek-Latin period begins and we see how that age arose which inaugurated Natural Science. In this last something again is introduced as was the case with the pyramids, something representing the special penetration of human evolution with what is new.

The Romans could not uphold what was to the Greeks full of life; they could only carry out that abstraction and intellectuality which died in the lifeless Latin language. We must take heed of all this to-day because we have more consciousness than the Greeks. And from out of our consciousness we must take heed that we prevent from within that destruction which came upon Greece and which stands as a fearful example before us. We must learn from history in such a way that it will not happen to us as it has happened to men who were weak because they depended upon what was outward. We must conquer what could not be conquered in earlier ages. And when it is said that one must learn from history, we must do this in such a way that we steel ourselves and become attentive to what ancient times can teach us so that we not only learn to avoid those mistakes made by individuals but also what should be named the necessary omissions in human evolution. What threatens to come upon humanity today as it happened in the past must be overcome. We have got to transcend a great crisis. And we can only understand the nature of this present crisis if we understand it in the light of a deep comprehension of human evolution. Together with this we will understand how a spiritual Science arises from out of Natural Science. This can only be understood through being able to grasp it from out of the entire spirit of human evolution.

The title of today's lecture no doubt reminds you of a passage in Goethe's Faust, when Faust, representing striving man, enters into a pact with evil powers, represented by the emissary from hell, Mephistopheles. Faust is to sign the pact in blood. At first he regards this as a joke, but Goethe undoubtedly meant the words spoken by Mephistopheles at this point to be taken seriously: “Blood is a very special fluid.”

Goethe¹ commentators usually provide curious interpretations of this passage. You will be aware that so much has been written about Goethe's Faust that it can fill libraries. I naturally cannot go into what every commentator has said about this particular passage, but it all amounts more or less to what is said by a recent commentator, Professor Jacob Minor.² Like others, he regards Mephistopheles' remark to be ironic, but Minor adds a curious sentence. I quote it in order to illustrate the amazing things said about Goethe's Faust. Minor states: “The devil is an enemy of blood.” He goes on to point out that as blood invigorates and sustains human life, the devil, being an enemy of the human race, must of necessity be also an enemy of blood. Minor is quite right when he further demonstrates that in sagas and legends blood always plays the kind of role it plays in Goethe's Faust. The oldest version of the Faust legend clearly describes how Faust makes a slight cut in his left hand with a penknife, dips a quill in the blood in order to sign the agreement, and as he does so, the blood, flowing from the wound, forms the words: “Oh man, escape!”

This is all quite correct, but what about the remark that the devil is an enemy of blood and for that reason demands the signature written in blood? Can you imagine anyone wishing to possess the very thing he abhors? The only reasonable interpretation of the passage is that Goethe, as well as earlier writers of Faust legends, wishes to show that the devil regards blood as especially valuable, and that to him it is important that the deed is signed in blood rather than in neutral ink. The supposition must be that the representative of the powers of evil believes, or rather is convinced, that he will gain a special power over Faust by possessing at least a drop of his blood. It is quite obvious that Faust must sign in blood, not because the devil is his enemy, but because he wants to have power over him. The reason behind this passage is a strange premonition that if someone gains power over an individual's blood, one gains power over the person. In short, the feeling is that blood is a very special fluid and it is the real issue in the fight for an individual's soul between good and evil.

A radical change must come about in our modern understanding and evaluation of the sagas and myths handed down since ancient times. We cannot go on regarding legends, fables and myths as childlike folklore or pretentiously declare them to be poetical expressions of a nation's soul. The poetic soul of a nation is nothing but a fantasy product of donnish officialdom. Anyone with true insight into the soul of a people knows with certainty that the contents of fables and myths, depicting powerful beings and wonderful happenings, is something very much more profound than mere invention. When with knowledge provided by spiritual research we delve into sagas and myths, allowing the mighty primordial pictures to act on us, we begin to recognize the profound ancient wisdom they reveal.

To begin with, one naturally wonders how it was possible for primitive man, with his unsophisticated views, to depict in the form of fables and myths, cosmic riddles that are unveiled and described in exact terms by means of modern spiritual research. This at first seems very surprising. However, as further research reveals how these ancient fables and myths came into existence, one ceases to be amazed, and all doubt vanishes. One discovers that myths and fables, far from containing naive views, are filled with primordial wisdom. A thorough study of myths and fables yields infinitely more insight than today's intellectual, experimental sciences. Admittedly the approach to such a study must be with spiritual scientific methods. Whatever legends have to say about blood is important, because in earlier times an individual's inherent wisdom made him aware of the true significance of blood, this special fluid that in human beings is a stream of flowing life.

Whence this wisdom came in ancient times is not our concern today; it will be the subject of a later lecture, though an indication will be given at the close of this one. Today we shall look at the significance of blood in human evolution and its role in cultural life. However, our discussion will not be from a physiological, or any other natural scientific point of view, but from that of spiritual science. It will be a help if before pursuing our subject we remind ourselves of a maxim that originated within the civilization of ancient Egypt, where the priestly wisdom of Hermes held sway. This maxim, which expresses a fundamental truth, is known as the Hermetic maxim and runs as follows: As above, so below.

All kinds of trivial explanations of this saying are to be found, but the one that concerns us today is the following. It is obvious to spiritual science that the world accessible to our five senses, far from being complete in itself, is a manifestation of a spiritual world hidden behind it. This hidden world is called, according to the Hermetic axiom, the “world above, or the upper world.” The sense world spread all about us, perceptible to our senses and accessible to our intellect, is called the “world below,” and is an expression of the spiritual world above it. The physical world is therefore not complete to the spiritual researcher, but is a kind of physiognomic expression of the soul and spirit world behind it, just as when looking at a human face one does not stop short at its shape and features, but recognizes them as an expression of the soul and spirit behind them.

What everyone does instinctively when faced with an ensouled being, the spiritual researcher does in regard to the whole world. The axiom, As above, so below, when applied to a human being, means that a person's soul impulses come to expression on the face. A hard, coarse face denotes coarseness of soul, a smile inner joy, and tears inner suffering.

Let us now apply the Hermetic axiom to the question: What is wisdom? Spiritual science has often pointed to the fact that human wisdom is related to experience, particularly to painful experience. For someone actually in the throes of pain and suffering, the immediate experience will no doubt be inner discord. But when pain and suffering have been conquered, when only their fruits remain, a person will say that from the experience a measure of wisdom is gained. The happiness, enjoyment and contentment life brings one gratefully accepts; but more valuable by far, once it is overcome, is the pain and suffering, for to that people owe what wisdom they possess. Spiritual science recognizes in wisdom something like crystallized pain; pain transformed into its opposite.

It is interesting that modern research, with its more materialistic approach, has come to the same conclusion. A book well worth reading was published recently about the mimicry of thought. The writer is not an anthroposophist, but a natural scientist and psychologist. He sets out to show that a person's thought life reveals itself in the physiognomy, and draws attention to the fact that a thinker's facial expression always suggest assimilated pain.

Thus, you see emerging, interspersed with more materialistic views, a confirmation of an ancient maxim that originated from spiritual knowledge. This will happen more and more frequently; you will find ancient wisdom gradually reappearing within the framework of modern science.

Spiritual research confirms that everything that surrounds us in the world: the configuration of minerals, the covering of vegetation, the world of animals, is the physiognomic expression of the life of spirit behind it. It is the “below” reflecting the “above.” Spiritual science maintains that what thus surrounds us can be properly understood only when one has knowledge of the “above,” that is, knowledge of the prototypes, the primordial beings from whom it all originated. Today we shall turn our attention to that which creates on earth its physiognomic expression in the blood. Once the spiritual background of blood is understood, it will be recognized that such knowledge must of necessity influence our spiritual and cultural life.

The problems human beings are facing today are momentous and pressing—especially educational problems involving not only the young but also entire populations. These particular problems are bound to increase as time goes on. The great social upheavals taking place make this evident to anyone. Demands causing anxiety are continually made, whether in the guise of the woman question, the labor question or the peace question. These are all problems that become understandable once insight is gained into the spiritual nature of blood.

Another question, similar in nature, which is again coming to the fore, is that of race. The racial problem cannot be understood unless one understands the mysterious effect when blood of different races is mingled. And finally, there is the problem of colonization that also belongs in this category. This problem has become even more pressing since attempts have been made to tackle it more consistently than was formerly the case. It arises when cultivated people are to share their lives with uncultivated people. Certain questions ought to be asked when attempts are made to tackle the problem: To what extent is it possible for a primitive people to assimilate a strange culture? Can a savage become civilized? What here comes under consideration are vital and far-reaching questions of existence, not just concern about doubtful morality. It is unlikely that one will find the right way of introducing a strange culture to a people if it is not known whether it is on an ascending or descending line of evolution; whether this or that aspect of its life is ruled by its blood. When the significance of blood is discussed, all these things come under scrutiny.

The physical composition of blood will be known to you from science in general. In humans, and also in the higher animals, blood is truly the stream of life. Our inner bodily nature is in contact with the external world through the fact that we absorb into the blood the life-giving oxygen from the air, a process by which the blood is renewed. The blood that meets the instreaming oxygen acts as a kind of poison, as a kind of destroyer within the organism. This blue-red blood, by absorbing the oxygen, is transformed into red, life-giving blood through a process of combustion. This red blood that penetrates all parts of the organism has the task to absorb directly into itself substances from the outer world, and deposit them as nourishment along the shortest route within the body. Humans and the higher animals must of necessity first absorb nutritive substances into the blood, then, having formed the blood, absorb into it oxygen from the air and finally build up and sustain the body by means of the blood.

A knowledgeable psychologist once remarked that the blood circulating through the body is not unlike a second person who, in relation to the one made of bone, muscle and nerve, constitutes a kind of outer world. And indeed our entire being constantly takes from the blood what sustains it, and gives back what it cannot use. One could say that a person carries in his or her blood a double (Doppelgänger) who, as a constant companion, furnishes him or her with renewed strength and relieves a person of what is useless. It is entirely justified to refer to blood as a stream of life and compare its importance with that of fibre. What fibre is for the lower organism. blood is for the human being as a whole.

The distinguished scientist Ernst Haeckel³ has probed deeply into nature's workshop, and in his popular works he quite rightly points out that blood is the last to develop in an organism. When tracing the stages of development in a human embryo, one finds rudiments of bone and muscle long before there is any indication of blood formation. Only late in embryonic development does formation of blood and blood vessels become apparent. This leads natural science to rightly conclude that blood made its appearance only late in world evolution, and that forces already in existence had first to reach a stage of development comparable to that of blood before they could accomplish what was necessary in the human organism. When as embryos human beings repeat once more the earlier stages of human evolution, they adapt to what existed before blood first made its appearance, This a person must do in order to achieve the crowning glory of evolution: the enhancement and transmutation of all that went before into that special fluid that is blood.

If we are to enter into the mysterious laws of the spiritual realm that hold sway behind blood, we must first take a brief look at some of the basic ideas of spiritual science. You will come to see that these basic ideas are the “above,” and that this “above” comes to expression in the laws that govern blood, as it does in all other laws, as if in a physiognomy.

There are in the audience some who are acquainted with the basics of spiritual science; they will allow a brief repetition for the sake of others who are present for the first time. In any case, repetitions help to make these basic ideas clearer, as light will be thrown on them from a different aspect. In fact, what I am going to say may well appear as just a string of words to those who as yet know nothing about spiritual science, and are therefore unfamiliar with this outlook on life. However, when ideas behind words seem to have no meaning, it is not always the ideas that are at fault. In this context a witty remark made by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg⁴ is apt. He said: If a head and a book collide and the result is a hollow sound, it is not always the book's fault. So, too, when some of our contemporaries pass judgment on spiritual truths, which to them seem like a string of words, it is not always spiritual science that is at fault. However, those acquainted with spiritual science will know that the references made to higher beings are to beings that really do exist, even if they cannot be found in the physical world.

Spiritual science recognizes that humans, as they appear in the sense world to physical sight, represent only a part of their true being. In fact, behind the physical body there are several more principles that are invisible to ordinary sight. Human beings have the physical body in common with the so-called surrounding lifeless mineral world. In addition, they have a life body, or ether body. What is here understood by ether is not that of which natural science speaks. The life body or ether body is not something speculative or thought out, but is as concretely visible to the spiritual senses of the clairvoyant as are physical colors to physical sight.

The ether body is the principle that calls inorganic matter into life and, in lifting it out of lifelessness, weaves it into the fabric of life. Do not for a moment imagine that the life body is something the spiritual investigator thinks into the lifeless. Natural science attempts to do that by imagining something called the “principle of life” into what is found under the microscope, whereas the spiritual investigator points to a real definite entity. The natural scientist adopts, as it were, the attitude that whatever exists must conform to the faculties a person happens to have; therefore, what he or she cannot perceive does not exist. This is just about as clever as a blind person saying that colors are nothing but a product of fantasy. The person to pass judgment on something must be the one who has experienced it, not someone who knows nothing about it.

Nowadays one talks of “ignorabimus” and “limits of knowledge”; this is possible only as long as human beings remain as they are. But, as spiritual science points out, we are constantly evolving, and once we develop the necessary organs, we will perceive, among other things, the ether body, and will no longer speak of “limits of knowledge.” Agnosticism is grave obstacle to spiritual progress because it insists that, as human beings are as they are, their knowledge can only be limited accordingly. All that can be said to this is that then human beings must change, and when they do they will be able to know things they cannot now know things they cannot now know.

Thus, the second member of a person's being is the ether body, which one has in common with the vegetable kingdom.

A human being's third member is the astral body. This name, as well as being beautiful, is also significant; that it is justified will be shown later. Those who wish to find another name only show that they have no inkling as to why the astral body is so named. In humans and animals, the astral body bestows on living substance the ability to experience sensation. This means that not only do currents of fluid move within it, but also sensations of joy, sorrow, pleasure and pain. This capacity constitutes the essential difference between plant and animal, although transitional stages between them do exist.

A certain group of scientists believes that sensation should be ascribed also to plants, but that is only playing with words. Certainly some plants do react when something approaches them, but it has nothing to do with sensation or feeling. When the latter is the case, an image arises within the creature in response to the stimulus. Even if certain plants respond to external stimuli, that is no proof that they experience inner sensation. The inwardly felt has its seat in the astral body. Thus, we see that creatures belonging to the animal kingdom consist of physical body, ether or life body, and astral body.

Human beings tower above the animal through a specific quality, often sensed by thoughtful natures. In his autobiography, Jean Paul⁵ relates the deep impression made upon him when, as a small child, standing in the courtyard of his parent's house, the thought suddenly flashed through his mind: “I am an ‘I,’ I am a being who inwardly calls himself ‘I.’ ” What is here described is of immense significance, yet generally overlooked by psychologists. A subtle observation will illustrate what is involved: In the whole range of speech, there is one small word that in its application differs from all others. We can all give a name to the objects in this room. Each one of us will call the table, “table,” the chairs, “chairs,” but there is one word, one name that can only refer to the one who speaks it: the little word “I.” No one can call someone else “I.” The word “I” must sound forth from the innermost soul to which it applies. To me, everyone else is a “you,” and I am a “you” to everyone else.

Religions have recognized that the “I” is that principle in us that makes it possible for the human soul to express its innermost divine nature. With the “I” begins what can never enter the soul through the external senses, what must sound forth in its innermost being. It is where the monologue, the soliloquy, begins in which, if the path has been made clear for the spirit's entry, the divine Self may reveal itself.

In religions of earlier cultural epochs, and still in the Hebrew religion, the word “I” was called: “The unutterable name of God.” No matter how it is interpreted according to modern philology, the ancient Hebrew name for God signifies what today is expressed by the word “I.” A hush went through the assembly when the initiate spoke the “Name of the Unknown God”; the people would dimly sense the meaning contained in the words that resounded through the temple: “I am the I am.”

Thus, the human being consists of physical body, ether body, astral body and the “I” or the essential inner being. This inner being contains within itself the germ of the three further evolutionary stages that will arise out of the blood. They are: Manas or Spirit Self, in contrast to the bodily self; Buddhi or Life Spirit; and a human's true spiritual being: Atma or Spirit Man, which today rests within us as a tiny seed to reach perfection in a far-off future; a stage to which at present we can only look to as a far-distant ideal. Therefore, just as we have seven colors in the rainbow and seven tones in the scale, we have seven members of our being that divide into four lower and three higher.

If we now look upon the three higher spiritual members as the “above” and the four lower as the “below,” let us try to get a clear picture of how the above creates a physiognomic expression in the below as it appears to physical sight. Take first what we have in common with the whole inorganic nature, that is, that which crystallized into the form of a person's physical body. When we speak of the physical body in a spiritual-scientific sense, it is not what can be seen physically that is meant, but the combination of forces behind it that constructed this form. The next member of our being is the ether body, which plants and animals also possess, and by means of which they are endowed with life. The ether body transforms physical matter into living fluids, thus raising what is merely material into living form. In animal and human the ether body is permeated by the astral body, which calls up in the circulating fluid inner participation of its movement, causing the movement to be reflected inwardly.

We have now reached the point where the being of humans can be understood insofar as they are related to the animal kingdom. The substances, such as oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, sulphur, phosphorus, and so forth, out of which our physical body is composed, are to be found outside in inorganic nature. If the substances transformed by the ether body into living matter are to attain the capacity to create inner mirror images of external events, then the ether body must be permeated by the astral body. It is the astral body that gives rise to sensations and feelings, but at the animal level does so in a specific way.

The ether body transforms inorganic substances into living fluids; the astral body transforms living substance into sensitive substance. But—and of this please take special note—a being composed of no more than the three bodies is only capable of sensing itself. It is only aware of its own life processes; its existence is confined within the boundaries of its own being. This fact is most interesting, and it is important to keep it in mind. Look for a moment at what has developed in a lower animal: inorganic matter is transformed into living substance, and living mobile substance into sensitive substance. The latter is to be found only where there is at least the rudiment of what at a higher stage becomes a developed nervous system.

Thus, we have inorganic substance, living substance, and nerve substance capable of sensation. In a crystal you see manifest certain laws of inorganic nature. (A crystal can be formed only within the whole surrounding nature.) No single entity could exist by itself separated from the rest of the cosmos. If we were to be transferred a mile or two above the earth's surface, we would die. Just as we are conceivable only within the environment to which we belong, where the necessary forces exist that combine to form and sustain us, so too, in the case of a crystal. A person who knows how to look at a crystal will see it as an individual imprint of the whole of nature, indeed of the whole cosmos. Georges Leopold Chrètien Cuvier⁶ is quite right when he says that a competent anatomist is able to deduce from a single bone to what kind of animal it belongs, as each kind has its own specific bone formation.

So you see that in the form of a crystal a certain aspect of the whole cosmos is reflected, just as an aspect of the whole cosmos is imprinted on living substance. The fluid circulating in a living creature is a small world that mirrors the great world. When substance possesses not only life, but also experiences inner sensation, it mirrors universal laws; it becomes a microcosm that dimly senses within itself the whole macrocosm. As the crystal is an image of cosmic form, so is sentient life an image of cosmic life. The dullness of consciousness in simple creatures is compensated by its immense range, for mirrored in it is the whole cosmos.

The constitution of humans is simply a more intricate structure composed of the three bodies already found in simple sentient creatures. If you consider people while disregarding their blood, you have beings built up from the same substances as those to be found in their environment. Like the plant, human beings contain fluids that call mineral substances to life, which in turn incorporate a system of nerves. The first nerves to appear are those of the so-called sympathetic nervous system. In humans it extends along both sides of the vertebral column, forming a series of knots from which it branches out and sends threads to the various organs, the lungs, the digestive tract and so on.

In the first instance, the sympathetic nervous system gives rise to the kind of sentient life just described. But a person's consciousness does not reach down far enough to experience the cosmic processes it mirrors. The surrounding cosmic world out of which the human being, as a living being, is created, mirrors itself in the sympathetic nervous system. There is in these nerves a dull inner life. If human beings could dive down consciously into the sympathetic nervous system, while the higher nervous system fell asleep, they would behold in a world of light the workings of the great cosmic laws.

Human beings once had a clairvoyant faculty that has been superseded. However, it can still be experienced, if through certain measures the function of the higher nervous system is suspended, setting free the lower consciousness. When that happens, the world is experienced through the lower nervous system in which the environment is mirrored in a special way. Certain lower animals still have this kind of consciousness. As explained, it is extremely dull, but provides a dim awareness of a far wider aspect of the world than the tiny section perceived by humans today.

At the time when evolution had reached the stage of the cosmos being mirrored in the sympathetic nervous system, another event occurred in human beings. The spinal cord was added to the sympathetic nervous system. The system of brain and spinal cord extended to the organs, through which contact was established with the outer world. Once their organisms had reached this stage, humans were no longer obliged to be merely a mirror for the primordial cosmic laws; the mirror image itself now entered into relationship with the environment. The incorporation of the higher nervous system in addition to the sympathetic nervous system denoted the transformation that had occurred in the astral body. Whereas formerly it participated dully in the life of the cosmos, it now contributed its own inner experiences.

Through the sympathetic nervous system, a being senses what takes place outside itself; through the higher nervous system, what takes place within itself. In individuals at the present stage of their evolution, the highest form of the nervous system is developed; it enables people to obtain from the highly structured astral body what is needed to formulate mental pictures of the outer world. Therefore, a person has lost the ability to experience the environment in the original dull pictures. Instead, individuals are aware of their inner life, and build within the inner self a new world of pictures on a higher level. This world of mental pictures mirrors, it is true, a much smaller section of the outer world, but does so much more clearly and perfectly.

Hand in hand with this transformation, another one occurred on a higher evolutionary level. The reorganization of the astral body became extended to the ether body. Just as the ether body through its reorganization became permeated with the astral body, and just as there was added to the sympathetic nervous system that of the brain and spinal cord, so what was set free from the ether body—after it had called into being the circulation of living fluids—now transformed these lower fluids into what we call “blood.”

Blood denotes an individualized ether body, just as the brain and spinal cord denote an individualized astral body. And through this individualizing comes about that which expresses itself as the “I.”

Having traced man's evolution up to this point, we notice that we are dealing with a gradation in five stages: First the physical body (or inner forces); second the ether body (or living fluids, to be found also in plants); third the astral body (manifesting itself in the lower or sympathetic nervous system); fourth the higher astral body emerging from the lower astrality (manifesting itself in the brain and spinal cord); and finally the principle that individualizes the ether body.

Just as two of humanity's principles, the ether, and astral bodies, have become individualized, so will the human being's first principle, built up out of external lifeless substances, that is, the physical body, become individualized. In present day humanity there is only a faint indication of this transformation.

We see that formless substances come together in the human body, that the ether body transforms them into living forms, that through the astral body the outer world is reflected and becomes inner sensation, and finally this inner life produces of itself pictures of the outer world.

When the process of transformation extends to the etheric body, the result is the forming of blood. This transformation manifests itself in the system of heart and blood vessels, just as the transformation of the astral body manifests in the system of brain and spinal cord. And, as through the brain the outer world becomes inner world, so does this inner world become transformed through the blood into an outer manifestation as the human body. I shall have to speak in similes if I am to describe these complicated processes. The pictures of the external world made inward through the brain are absorbed by the blood and transformed into vital formative forces. These are the forces that build up the human body; in other words, blood is the substance that builds the body. We are dealing with a process that brings the blood into contact with the outer world; it enables it to take from it the most perfect substance, oxygen. Oxygen continually renews the blood, endowing it with new life.

In tracing human development, we have followed a path that leads from the outer world to humanity's inner world and back to the outer world. We have seen that the origin of blood coincides with our ability to face the world as an independent being, a being able to form his or her own pictures of the external world from its reflection within the self. Unless this stage is reached, a being cannot say “I” to itself. Blood is the principle whereby “I-hood” is attained. An “I” can express itself only in a being who is able independently to formulate the pictures the outer world produces within the self. A being who has attained “I-hood” must be able to take in the outer world and recreate it within the self.

If we possessed only a brain without a spinal cord, we would still reproduce within ourselves pictures of the outer world and be aware of them, but only as a mirror image. It is quite different when we are able to build up anew what is repeated within ourselves; for then what we thus build up is no longer merely pictures of the outer world; it is the “I.” A being who possesses brain and spinal cord will not only mirror the outer world, as does a being with only the sympathetic nervous system, but will also experience the mirrored picture as inner life. A being who in addition possesses blood will experience inner life within the self. The blood, assisted by oxygen taken from the outer world, builds up the individual body according to the inner pictures. This is experienced as perception of the “I”.

The “I” turns its vision inwards into a person's being, and its will outwards to the world. This twofold direction manifests itself in the blood, which directs its forces inwards, building up a person's being, and outwards towards the oxygen. When humans fall asleep they sink into unconsciousness because of what the consciousness experiences within the blood, whereas when they, by means of sense organs and brain, form mental pictures of the outer world, then the blood absorbs these pictures into its formative forces. Thus, the blood exists midway between an inner picture-world and an outer world of concrete forms. This becomes clearer if we look at two phenomena. One is that of genealogy, that is, the way conscious beings are related to ancestors, the other is the way we experience external events.

We are related to ancestors through the blood. We are born within a specific configuration, within a certain race, a certain family and from a certain line of ancestors. Everything inherited comes to expression in our blood. Likewise, all the results from an individual's physical past accumulates in the blood, just as within it there is prepared a prototype of that person's future. Consequently, when the individual's normal consciousness is suppressed, for example under hypnosis or in cases of somnambulism or atavistic clairvoyance, a much deeper consciousness becomes submerged. Then, in a dreamlike fashion, the great cosmic laws are perceived. Yet this perception is nevertheless clearer than that of ordinary dreams even when lucid. In such conditions all brain activity is suppressed, and in deep somnambulism even that of the spinal cord. In this condition what the person experiences is conveyed by the sympathetic nervous system; the individual has a dull, hazy awareness of the whole cosmos. The blood no longer conveys mental pictures produced by the inner life through the brain; it only conveys what the outer world has built including everything inherited from ancestors. Just as the shape of a person's nose stems from his or her ancestors, so does the whole bodily form. In this state of consciousness a person senses his ancestors in the same manner that waking consciousness senses mental pictures of the outer world. A person's blood is haunted by his ancestors; he dimly participates in their existence.

Everything in the world evolves, also human consciousness. If we go back to the time when our remote ancestors lived, we find that they possessed a different type of consciousness. Today, during waking life we perceive external objects through the senses, and transform them into mental pictures that act an our blood. Everything a person experiences through the senses is working in not only his blood but also in his memory. By contrast, a person remains unconscious of everything bestowed by ancestors. We know nothing about the shape of our inner organs. In the past all this was different; at that time the blood conveyed not only what it received from outside through the senses, but also what existed in the bodily form, and as this was inherited, we could sense our ancestors within our own being.

If you imagine such a consciousness enhanced, you will get an idea of the kind of memory that corresponded to it. When our experiences are confined to what can be perceived through the senses, then only such sense perceptible experiences are remembered. A person's consciousness comprises only his experiences since childhood.

In the past this was different, because the inner life contained all that was brought over through heredity. A human's mental life depicted ancestors' experiences as if they were his own. A person could remember not only his own childhood, but his ancestors' lives, because they were contained in the pictures absorbed by his blood. Incredible as it may seem to the modern materialistic outlook, there was a time when human consciousness was such that an individual regarded both his and his forefathers' physical experiences as his own. When someone said: “I have experienced... ,” he referred not only to personally known events but also to events experienced by his ancestors. It was a dim and hazy consciousness compared with modern human waking consciousness, more like a vivid dream. However, it was much more encompassing, as it included not only his own life but the lives of ancestors. A son would feel at one with his father and grandfather, as if they were sharing the same “I.” This was also the reason he did not give himself a personal name but one that included past generations, designating what they had in common with one and the same name. Each person felt strongly that he was simply a link in a long line of generations.

The question is how this form of consciousness came to be transformed into a different one. It happened through an event well-known to spiritual historical research. You will find that every nation the world over describes a significant moment in history when a new phase of its culture began—the moment when the old traditions begin to lose their influence, and the ancient wisdom that had flowed down the generations via the blood begins to wane, although the wisdom still finds expression in myths and sagas.

A tribe used to be an enclosed unit; its members married among themselves. You will find this to be the case in all races and peoples. It was a significant moment in the history of mankind when this custom ceased to be upheld—the moment when a mingling of blood took place through the fact that marriage between close relations was replaced by marriage between strangers. Marriage within a tribe ensured that the same blood flowed through its members down the generations; marriage between strangers allowed new blood to be introduced into a people.

The tribal law of intermarriage will be broken sooner or later among all peoples. It heralds the birth of the intellect, which means ability to understand the external world, to understand what is foreign.

The important fact to bear in mind is that in ancient times a dim clairvoyance existed out of which arose sagas and legends, and that the clairvoyant consciousness is based on unmixed blood, whereas our awakened consciousness depends on mixed blood. Surprising as it may seem, marriage between strangers has resulted in logical, intellectual thoughts. This is a fact that will increasingly be confirmed by external research, which has already made a beginning in that direction. The mingling of blood extinguishes the former clairvoyance and enables humanity to reach a higher stage of evolution. When a person today goes through esoteric training and causes clairvoyance to reappear, that person transforms it to a higher consciousness, whereas today's waking consciousness has evolved out of the ancient dim clairvoyance.

In our time, a person's whole surrounding world in which he acted came to expression in the blood; consequently, this surrounding world formed the inner in accordance with the outer. In ancient times it was more a person's inner bodily life that came to expression in the blood. A person inherited, along with the memory of his ancestors' experiences, also their good or bad inclinations; these could be traced in his blood. This ancestral bond was severed when blood became mingled through outside marriages. The individual began to live his own personal life; he learned to govern his moral inclinations according to his own experiences. Thus, ancestral power holds sway in unmixed blood; that of personal experience in mixed blood.

Myths and legends told of these things: “That which has power over thy blood has power over thee.” Ancestral power over a folk came to an end when the blood, through being mingled with foreign blood, ceased to be receptive to its influence. This held good in all circumstances.

Whatever power wishes to subjugate a person will have to exert an influence that imprints itself in his blood. Thus, if an evil power wishes dominance over an individual, it must gain dominance over his or her blood. That is the profound meaning of the quotation from Faust, and the reason the representative of evil says: “Sign your name to the pact in blood; once I possess your name written in your blood, I shall have caught you by the one thing that will hold man. I shall then be able to pull you over to my side.” That which possesses a person's blood possesses that person, and possesses the human “I. ”

When two groups of human beings confront one another, as used to be the case in colonization, then only if there is true insight into evolutionary laws is there any possibility of foreseeing if the foreign culture can be assimilated. Take the case of a people that is very much at one with its environment, a people into whose blood the environment has as it were inserted itself. No attempt to graft upon it a foreign culture will succeed. It is simply impossible, and is also the reason why in certain regions the original inhabitants became extinct when colonized. One must approach such problems with insight and realize that anything and everything cannot be forced upon a people. It is useless to demand of blood more than it is able to endure.

Modern science has discovered recently that if blood from one animal is mixed with that of another not akin to it, the two types of blood prove fatal to one another. This is something that has been known to spiritual knowledge for a long time. Just as unrelated types of blood if mixed cause death, so is the old clairvoyance killed in primitive humanity when blood from different lines of descent are mingled. Our modern intellectual life is entirely the outcome of the mingling of blood. Once this approach is adopted it will be possible to study what effect the mingling of blood has had on the various people in the course of history.

Thus, when the blood of animals from different evolutionary stages is mixed the result is death, whereas that is not the case when the species are related. The human organism survives when, through marriage, blood is mingled with strange blood; here the result is the extinction of the original animal kind of clairvoyance, and the birth in evolution of a new consciousness. In other words, something happens in humans, but on a higher level, that is similar to what happens in the animal kingdom where strange blood kills strange blood. In the human kingdom strange blood kills the hazy clairvoyance that is based on kindred blood.

Therefore, it is a destructive process that gave rise to the modern human wakeful day-consciousness. The kind of spiritual life that resulted from intermarriage has been destroyed in the course of evolution; while the very thing that destroyed it, that is, marriage between strangers, gave birth to the intellect and today's lucid consciousness.

What is able to live in a person's blood lives in that person's “I.” Just as the physical principle comes to expression in the physical body, the ether body comes to expression in the system of living fluids, and the astral body in the system of nerves, so does the “I” come to expression in the blood. Physical principle, ether body and astral body are the “above” blood; the “I” forms the center; and physical body, living fluids and nervous system are the “below.” Therefore, whatever power wishes to dominate humans must take possession of their blood.

These are things that must be taken into account if progress is to be achieved in practical life. For example, just because the “I” comes to expression in the blood, a people's racial character can be destroyed through colonization, when more is demanded than the blood can endure.

Not till Beauty and Truth become part of a person's blood does he truly possess them. Mephistopheles wants power over Faust's “I”; that is why he seizes Faust's blood. So you see that the quotation, which is the Leitmotiv of this lecture, arose out of profound knowledge. Blood is indeed a very special fluid.

• 1. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) was a German poet, novelist, and playwright.
• 2. Jacob Minor (1855–1912) was professor of philology.
• 3. Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919) was a German biologist who supported Darwin's theory of evolution and his theory of ontogeny or the development of an individual organism.
• 4. Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1744–1799) was a physicist and satirical writer.
• 5. Jean Paul (Jean Paul Friedrich Richter, 1763–1825), German author.
• 6. Georges Leopold Chretien Couvier (1769–1832) was a French comparative anatomist and the founder of paleontology.

Between the ages of seven and approximately fourteen, the teacher's main concern must be directed toward the students' evolving life of feeling. It is really very important that educators acquire the ability to create the kind of mental imagery that can guide pupils through the tender transitional stages characteristic of this period.

When children enter school, remnants of the previous “bodily-religious mood,” as I call it, still exist. There is still a longing in children to absorb through the senses everything happening in their surroundings; this perceiving, which is transformed into imitation, then connects with listening for what comes from the natural authority of the teacher. Truth, at this stage, is not based on the child's judgment, but comes in the guise of what the naturally revered authority of the teacher says. Similarly, what is considered false simply agrees with what this freely accepted authority considers false. This also applies to what is seen as beautiful or ugly, good or evil. Children can only develop the faculty of independent judgment in adulthood if they have gone through the experience of looking up to the voice of authority with uncritical veneration. Of course I am not referring to any kind of enforced authority here; the authority I am speaking of must never be imposed externally. And if, in some cases, an authoritarian approach is necessary for the sake of general society, the child should not be aware of it. The child must always feel secure in looking up with total confidence to the teacher's authority or that of another adult in charge. Everything has to be supported by this tender relationship to authority from the day the child enters the first grade until the ninth year, and especially during the seventh to ninth years. This relationship should be preserved even longer, but between the ninth and tenth years it will necessarily change somewhat.

Within this same context we must now look at another point. During the initial period of life—that is, from birth until the change of teeth—the child lives like one great multifaceted sense organ, but as a sense organ where will forces were working in every moment of life. For me to use the expression “a sense organ where will forces are working,” may sound strange, but this is only because of the complete inadequacy of what we are told by contemporary physiology and the popular ideas derived from it. Today one does not associate will forces with the function of the human eye, for example. Nevertheless, even in the eye, the perceived image is due to will activity. The same is true of the functioning of every other sense organ: will-substance is instrumental in creating the inner sense impressions. The task of a sense organ, first of all, is to expose itself, or the human being, passively to the external world's influences. But within every sense organ an inner activity also occurs that has a will nature.

This will element works very intensively throughout the child's whole body until the change of teeth. It also remains active after this event, with the result that, between entering school and the ninth year, this predominant will element in the child will tolerate only an approach to external nature and to the human being that is entirely human and pictorial. This is why we introduce not aesthetics but a thoroughly artistic element, especially in the younger classes. We do this by allowing children to use liquid colors from the very beginning, even if this practice is likely to cause rather uncomfortable consequences in the classroom. We let children handle colors because, by putting them on paper next to one another—not according to preconceived notions, but simply from an instinctive sense of color; and through the ensuing inner satisfaction, they work in harmony with their own formative forces. When given this opportunity, children reveal a wonderful instinct for painting artistic color combinations, and these soon show the teacher how to direct children's efforts toward drawing with colored pencils from which writing can eventually evolve.

But one thing children at this age cannot do is follow explanations; they have no understanding for this at all. If a teacher tries to explain the subjects during the first school years, the children will react by becoming blunted and dull. This approach simply does not work. On the other hand, everything will go smoothly if, rather than explaining the subject matter, one forms the content into a story, if words are painted with mental images, and if rhythm is brought into one's whole way of teaching. If the teachers' relationship to music is not restricted to music in a narrow sense, but if they can introduce a musical element into their teaching—if their lessons are permeated by beat, rhythm, and other less obvious musical qualities—then children will respond spontaneously and with acute understanding. On the other hand, if the teachers who introduce the world by appealing to feeling in their students were to speak now of the human being as a separate entity, the children would feel inwardly resentful. They would reject it; indeed, they could simply not bear it. What children really want during this stage is for everything they learn about—even if it is part of inorganic nature—to be presented in living, human terms.

The inner horror (I think one can put it that strongly) of facing a description of the human being remains with the child until about the twelfth year. From the ninth to the twelfth year we can use what I described yesterday as the content for the lessons. As long as we present it imaginatively we can speak about the plant world in terms of hair growing out of the Earth, and we can introduce animal study by showing how in every animal form we can see a part of the human organism, but specialized in a one-sided way. At this stage, however, we must not study the human being directly as an object, because children are not yet ready for this. Only toward the twelfth year do they experience a dim longing to gather together the entire animal kingdom in order to discover synthesis of the animal world in the human being. This can form the new content for the classes, then, following the eleventh and twelfth years.

For you to be told that teachers should relate parts of the human organization to certain animal forms before their pupils have reached the necessary maturity to study the human being as a separate entity may sound contradictory, but life is full of such apparent contradictions. It is correct, nevertheless, to proceed in this way until the great moment comes when teachers can show their students how what is concentrated within one single human individual, is spread out over all of the animal kingdom. To allow children to experience very intensely such decisive moments in life is tremendously important in teaching; and one of these moments is the realization, passing through the child's soul, that the human being as seen physically is both the extract and the synthesis of the entire animal world, but on a higher level. The inner experience of such a climb over a childhood peak—if I may use this comparison—is more important than acquiring knowledge step by step. It will have a beneficial effect for the rest of the child's life. But because of the way our times have developed in an external scientific direction, there is little inclination to look so intimately at human nature. Otherwise things would not happen as they do in our civilization, especially in modern spiritual life. You only need to consider what I emphasized in our first meeting.

Until the seventh year, soul forces are working in all of the child's physical processes, concluding to a certain extent during the change of teeth. I have compared this with a solution that forms a sediment at the bottom of a container. The precipitate represents the denser parts, while a more refined solution remains above it. The two substances have separated from each other. Similarly, until the change of teeth, we can look at the child's physical and etheric bodies as still forming a homogeneous solution until the physical is precipitated, leaving the etheric free to work independently.

But now too much soul substance might be retained by the physical body. Part of the soul substance must always remain behind, because the human physical body must be permeated by soul and spirit throughout life. But too much soul and spiritual substance could be retained so that too little of it remains in the upper region. The result is a human being whose physical body is over-saturated with soul substance and whose soul and spiritual counterpart has become too insubstantial. This condition is met far too frequently, and with the necessary insight one can see it clearly in children between seven and fourteen. But in order to see this, one must be able to distinguish exactly between the coarser and the more refined components of our human organization.

It is essential today that our society develops a physiology backed by a strong enough psychology and a psychology that is not abstract, but supported by the necessary background of physiology. In other words, one has to be able to recognize the interrelationship between body and soul; otherwise an amateurish physiology and an equally amateurish psychology will result. Because of this lack of ability to see clearly through the human being, contemporary scientific life has produced two such dilettante branches of science. The reciprocal effect between them has resulted in “dilettantism squared,” or as it is also called, psychoanalysis.

Just as a number multiplied by itself is that same number squared, so also a dilettante physiology, when multiplied by dilettante psychology, equals psychoanalysis. This is the secret behind the origin of psychoanalysis. I am not saying this to cast aspersions on psychoanalysis. Things could hardly have been otherwise because, due to our present day scientific climate, society lives in a time when psychology has become too diluted and physiology too dense. Seen in this light, physiology, rather than becoming a genuine branch of science, assumes the role of the precipitate from what should have remained as a homogeneous solution. This is only a picture, but I hope that you understand it.

We cannot avoid the need to be clear about how the growing human being develops, and about how we have to give appropriate attention to each particular stage in the life of children. Thus, we find that between the ninth and twelfth years children are receptive to whatever comes to them as pictures. Until about the ninth year they want to participate in the formation of the picture—they will not yet play the role of spectators. During this time teachers have to work with their students in such a living way that their joint efforts, in and of themselves, already have a pictorial quality. It doesn't matter whether actual picture-making is involved, such as painting, drawing, or similar activities; all of the work, the lessons themselves, must form a picture. And then, between the ninth and tenth years, the children develop a new sense for a more external presentation of the pictorial element, and this is when we may appropriately introduce botany and animal study. Those two subjects in particular must be presented pictorially and imaginatively; and the more one can do this, the better one is as a teacher for children between nine and twelve—in contrast to what one finds in the usual textbooks on botany, where a great lack of imagery is displayed. Portraying the plant world in its many forms with true imagination is very rewarding, because to achieve this requires that one be “co-creative.”

This sharing in the world's creativity is just the thing our present culture awaits. People in the middle of life come to me, again and again, full of despair because they cannot comprehend anything pictorially. This shortcoming can be traced back to childhood when their needs were not adequately met.

It is much too easy for the world to laugh when we say that the human being consists of a physical body, etheric body, astral body, and I-being. As long as one merely evaluates these matters with the yardstick of ordinary science, one cannot help but laugh. This is very understandable. But considering the serious tangle of our civilization, one would expect at least some willingness to look for what cannot be found elsewhere. There are many instances of apparent conundrums. Of course, it is easy enough to denigrate the following description of the human being: The physical body is born at birth. It develops through body-bound religiosity, by imitation, until the change of teeth. During these early years the etheric body and all the other forces are fully engaged in working on the child's physical body; they are soul and spiritual forces working in the child. The astral body is born only at puberty, and gains its independent existence from that time on. And as far as the human I is concerned—this is something that can be spoken of with certain reservations only—the I is fully born only after the twentieth year of life. Although it may be wisest to remain silent about this last point when talking to young people engaged in their first years of academic study, it is nevertheless an unalterable fact.

If one does not know the characteristic differences between the four members of the human being, one is likely to look at these differentiations as being nonsense—or at least, something highly superfluous. This changes, however, as soon as one knows about the whole human being. You see, if we look at physical matter we find that its main characteristic is its exertion of a certain pressure. I could equally say that it occupies space. It presses on other matter, pushing it. It also presses on our body, and we experience this pressure through the sense of touch. Physical matter exerts pressure.

The nature of the etheric has a quality all its own. During the last forty or fifty years natural science has seen the etheric as a rather peculiar phenomenon. If one were to speak about all the theories formulated concerning the essence of the etheric, one would be kept busy for a long time. This has already reached the degree that many people assert that the etheric is essentially the same as the principles of mathematics and mechanics that work in space, existing merely as some kind of linear force. To many investigating minds, the essence of the etheric is not much more than differential quotients flying around in space, or at least something that is mathematically calculable.

As you can see, much hard thinking has delved into the question of what the etheric is, and this in itself is admirable enough. However, as long as one continues along these lines, nothing of real significance will be discovered about the etheric. One has to know that the etheric has the characteristic of being the polar opposite of pressure; it has the effect of suction. It always has the tendency to expedite physical matter out of space, to annihilate it. This is the characteristic feature of the etheric. Physical matter fills up space, and the etheric gets rid of space-occupying matter. It could be called negative matter, but in a qualitative sense and not from a quantitative perspective.

This applies also to the human etheric body. Our relationship to the physical and etheric bodies consists of our constantly destroying and renewing ourselves. The etheric continually destroys material substance, and the physical body builds it up again. This statement contradicts the law of conservation of energy, which is generally accepted today. I am mentioning this only in passing, but it is a fact, nevertheless, that this law of conservation of energy is not compatible with the inner nature of the human being, and that it contradicts the truth. Strictly speaking, this law applies only to the inorganic realm. Within the organic world it is only true of the iron particles in the blood serum, but not concerning the whole human being, in whom a constant oscillation occurs between the suction process of the etheric, whose forces destroy matter, and the restoration affected by the physical body.

The astral body not only draws in space but—strange as it sounds—it draws in time! It has the quality of leading backward in time. This will be clearer to us if we consider an older person's life. Imagine that you were, let's say, fifty years old. In your astral body, forces are always at work, leading you back to earlier times in your life, taking you back to times before puberty. Fifty-year-olds do not experience their present age in their astral body, but actually experience themselves as eleven, twelve, thirteen, or fourteen again. These past ages radiate back to them through the backward-leading activity of their astral bodies. This is the secret of life. In reality we grow older only with regard to the physical body, and with the etheric body and its oscillations. The astral body, however, leads us back again and again to previous stages of life. Regarding the astral body we are all still “adult children.” If we imagine the course of our lives expressed symbolically in the form of a tube, and if we have reached a certain point, say aged fifty, then our adult childhood shines right into our fifties, because the astral body always takes us back in time.

In the astral body, one always lives backward, but this retrospective life naturally begins only with the advent of puberty. If one can earnestly accept this in all earnestness, then one will appreciate its implications for education, and will give students something that will serve their later lives. Whatever one decides to do with them would then be seen in the context of their entire lives, even if they live to the age of ninety! This awareness will endow teachers with an appropriate sense of responsibility. It is this feeling of responsibility, arising from the knowledge of what one is really doing, that truly matters. However, this awareness can be developed only if teachers learn to recognize the hidden interconnections that affect human life. And if this happens, teachers will not assert that children should be taught only what they can comprehend fully. Such an attitude is truly appalling if one considers the true nature of the human being; pedagogical textbooks and handbooks written from the perspective of concrete demonstrations can lead one to despair. There the aim is always to come down to the level of the children's present stage of development and to treat everything so that they will see through them in every detail. This method deprives children of immensely important values for life, as anyone can see who recognizes how childhood is related to human life as a whole.

Let's take the example of a child who, at the age of eight, has accepted something that could not yet be comprehended, accepted something simply on the strength of a love and respect for the teacher, simply because whatever the teacher says must be right and good. Here, love for the teacher—or sympathy—was the vehicle for inner acceptance; the child may not understand the matter fully until sometime around the age of thirty-five. It is not easy to speak about such things to modern people, because they tend to disagree with the idea that sufficient maturity is gained only in the thirty-fifth year of life for understanding certain matters. It is nevertheless the truth, however, that only in the thirty-fifth year is one mature enough to understand certain things, things that one accepted as a child out of love for a teacher. Again, at this age one has experiences that result from the astral body's regressive forces. Something arises from within, a kind of a mirror reflection that, in reality, is a return to the days of childhood. It is like the arising of an inner vision. One is thirty-five years old, has become mature, and from the depths of one's soul there comes the realization: Only now do I understand what I accepted on trust when I was eight.

This ability to understand something that, permeated with love, has thus lived in one's being for many years, has a tremendously revitalizing effect on one's life. We can give this potential force of rejuvenation to children by safeguarding their inborn feeling for authority—so that such feeling can become a vehicle for love and sympathy—and also by giving children what they cannot yet fully comprehend, but will gradually ripen during the coming years of life. Such interconnections are not recognized by teachers who bring to their classes only what lies within their pupils' present capacity to understand. On the other hand, the opposite view is equally wrong and out of place. A teacher who knows human nature would never tell a child, “You cannot yet understand this.” One must never resort to such a remark, because one can always clothe what one has to say in an appropriate garment if the necessary rapport has been established with the students.

If the pedagogy we are speaking of here becomes instinctive, one will know just what to say at the right moment. Above all, one will avoid sharply defined or rigid concepts. It is really appalling when a teacher's ideas and concepts have been worked out to the degree that they are no longer adaptable or flexible. They would have an effect similar to the effect of iron gloves forced onto a child's little hands, preventing them from growing naturally. We must not chain children's minds to finished concepts, but give them concepts that can grow and expand further. We must give them living concepts that can be transformed. But this can be achieved only through an imaginative approach in every subject, certainly until the twelfth year; then the method of teaching I have thus far sketched for you will encourage you to use language creatively, to draw helpful drawings on the blackboard or to take up a paintbrush to make colorful illustrations of what you want to communicate. But there must always be an awareness that everything a teacher brings has to be inwardly mobile and capable of remaining so; for one must recognize that, with the approach of the twelfth year (actually very close to the twelfth year), something new begins to develop, and that is the sense for cause and effect.

Before the approach of the twelfth year, the concept of causality does not exist in the minds of children. They have an eye for what is mobile. They can apprehend ideas that are flexible, and they can perceive what comes in the form of pictures or music; anything connected with causality, however, makes no sense to them until about the twelfth year. Consequently, this concept must be avoided at all costs until this time, and then we may consider a newly emerging understanding for the relationship between cause and effect. Only at that time do children begin to have their own thoughts about various things. Previously they saw the world in pictures; but now something begins to dawn that will light up only at puberty—that is, the life of thinking and the ability to form judgments, which is closely connected with thinking.

Between the change of teeth and puberty, children live primarily in the realm of feeling; before the change of teeth, they live in the region of the will, which, while still far removed from the sphere of thinking, is intimately connected with the fact that children imitate their surroundings. But what enters the child's being physically at that time also contains moral and spiritual forces, which became firmly established in the child's organism. This is why, during the tenth and eleventh years (and in most cases until the beginning of the twelfth year) it is impossible to communicate knowledge that demands an understanding of causality. Consequently, one should not introduce students to the mineral kingdom until around the twelfth year. Also, concepts connected with physics should not be explored before that age, although these have to be prepared for earlier through imagery that bypasses causality. Anything relating to cause and effect in the inorganic world can be grasped by children only around the twelfth year. This is one side of the problem.

We meet the other side when teaching history. Around the twelfth year it is impossible to awaken in students an understanding of the complex fabric of historical interconnections. Until that age it is wise for teachers to present graphic descriptions of historical personages whose actions, due to their goodness, truth, and other qualities of greatness, will stimulate sympathy or, in the case of negative qualities, antipathy in the souls of children. At this stage, historical content should appeal, above all, to the students' feelings. This can be accomplished by a wise selection of historical personalities and events; these should, in themselves, present a complete story, which should nevertheless remain flexible in the students' minds (in the sense mentioned). Causal links between earlier and later historical events can be taught meaningfully only at the dawn of the regressive forces of the astral body; these forces come increasingly into their own after the fourteenth year. At about the twelfth year, children enter this reverse stream, and this is the time when one can begin to appeal to a sense of causality in history as well.

When this is done earlier (and closely connected with the concept of cause and effect is the formation of judgments) one puts something into motion that can become very damaging in later life. At first there is only the child's etheric body. Toward the twelfth year, the astral body slowly begins its process of birth, which is completed at puberty. But the etheric body was already fully developed before that. If you ask students to make judgments (which always have a yes or no quality), or if you have them remember prefabricated concepts, these will enter the etheric body instead of the still unborn astral body. But what else does the astral body carry? As you may conclude from the facts of sexual maturity, the astral body also carries human love. Love is, of course, already active in children before puberty, but it has not yet reached an independent existence, has not yet been born fully. Thus, critical judgments, with their attendant yes-or-no qualities, are instilled in the child's etheric body instead of in the astral body. On the other hand, when made at the right time, the astral body's power of love and benevolence becomes an integral part in forming judgments or criticisms. If you make the mistake of forcing children to form critical judgments—of making them decide between yes and no—too early, then you fill their etheric bodies with immature judgments. But the ether body is not benevolent. It draws in whatever is in its way. Indeed, in this context, it is even malicious; it has a destructive effect. And this is what you do to children when you ask them to decide yes-or-no judgments prematurely, because a yes-or-no judgment is always behind the concept of causality.

On the other hand, a historical process that is complete in itself, or historical characters who are vividly described, can simply be looked at in the way one looks at pictures. As soon as one links later historical periods to earlier ones, however, one has to make judgments, one has to reject or accept, and this choice always contains an element of yes or no. The final outcome of such premature judgment in children under the age of fourteen is an inner resentment toward judgments that are generally accepted by society. If the power of judging is developed too early, the judgments of others are received with a latent destructive force rather than with benevolence. These things demonstrate the importance of doing the right thing at the right time.

Keeping this in mind, let us again compare the animal with the human being. When looking at the animal's outer appearance, its form indicates everything it does. We can also observe the animal's behavior. But in the case of the human being, we have to look for inner causes. Since children are only mature enough to look for causes in the twelfth year, this is the proper time to present the animal world as a “spread-out human being,” or the human being as the synthesis of the entire animal kingdom. This is an instance where the teacher is asked to affect an experience in the child that satisfies an inner demand and readiness at this particular stage.

But now you have to acknowledge that this marks a powerful reversal in the child's nature between the change of teeth and puberty. In a certain sense, the child's soul now proceeds entirely from within outward. Recall that, until the twelfth year, children could not stand listening to a description of the human being, and now they are beginning to look at themselves as mirrors of the world—and they do this conceptually, in the form of ideas. This new readiness for a portrayal of the human being—that is, a portrayal of themselves—really does represent a complete about-face of children's nature between the second dentition and puberty.

During this same time—roughly between the ninth and tenth years—another very important transition occurs in the child's life. Individually, this change can vary; in some children it doesn't happen until after the tenth year. Each child, instinctively, unconsciously, faces a kind of riddle of life. This change of direction from within outward, this new awareness of being a self surrounded by an external world—whereas previously these two aspects were woven together—is something the child does not experience consciously, but through inner doubts and restlessness, which make themselves felt at that time. Physically, the breathing becomes properly integrated into the blood circulation, as the two processes begin to harmonize and balance each other. The relationship between the pulse and breathing is established. This is the physical aspect. The soul and spiritual counterpart is a new kind of dependence of the child on help from teachers or educators. This appeal for help is not necessarily expressed by direct questions, but in a characteristic form of behavior.

And now the teacher is called on to develop the skill necessary to correctly weigh this great, but unspoken, life question that lives in every student, although differently in each individual. What is this great life question? Up to this point, the child's natural sense of authority resulted from the image of the teacher as representative and mediator for the whole world. For the child, the stars moved because the teacher knew the stars' movement. Things were good or evil, beautiful or ugly, and true or false because this was the teacher's assessment. Everything that came from the world had to find the child through the teacher, and this represented the only healthy relationship between teacher and child.

Now however, between the ninth and the tenth years—sometimes a little later—a question arises within the child's soul, not as a concept or idea, but as a feeling. “From where does my teacher receive all this knowledge?” At this moment the teacher begins to become transparent to the student, if I may say it pictorially. The child wants to see the world as living behind the teacher, who must not fail now to confirm the student's heartfelt conviction that the teacher is properly attuned to the world, and embodies truth, beauty, and goodness. At this stage, the unconscious nature of children tests the teacher as never before. They want to discover whether the teacher is truly worthy of representing the entire world.

Again, all this has to remain unspoken. If a teacher were ever to mention or allude to it, through explanations or in other ways, this would appear only as a sign of weakness to the child, whose present state of consciousness has not yet developed a sense of causality; anything that requires proof only shows weakness and inner uncertainty. It is unnecessary to prove what is experienced powerfully in the soul.

This is also true concerning the history of our civilization. I do not want to go into details now, but merely give you a dynamic impression; until a particular time during the Middle Ages, people knew the meaning of the Last Supper. For them there was no need for proof. Then the situation suddenly changed. When seen in the proper light, this just shows that a real understanding of this event no longer existed. If someone is caught red-handed, no one would have to prove that such person is a thief. But if a thief escapes unseen, then proof must be found before that person can be properly called a thief. Proof is always demanded in cases of uncertainty, but not for what the facts of life tell us directly. This is why it is so ludicrous whenever people try to find the inner connection between formal logic and reality. This is somewhat like looking for the inner connection between a path leading to a mountain, and the mountain itself; the path is there to allow the wanderer to reach the mountain, and then the mountain itself begins. Logic is there only for the sake of reaching reality, and reality begins where logic ends.

Awareness of these things is of fundamental importance. One must not make the mistake of wanting to prove to students, when they are going through this important stage in life, that the world is being truthfully interpreted for them. When adjusting to this new situation in the classroom, one has to bring about in the pupils an unreasoned conviction that the teacher knows even more than they had previously imagined. The proper relationship between teacher and students can be established once again, perhaps while surprising the children with an amiable off-hand remark about something new and unexpected, which will make them sit up and listen; this can now happen if students feel that, until now, their teacher has not yet shown his or her true courage at all, and can truly reach unexpected heights. One has to save some things for just such moments, so that the teacher's image will continue to command respect. The solution to an important question of life lies within the students' feeling that their teacher can grow beyond even the boundaries of the personality. Here also are the comfort and strength one must give to children at this stage, so that one does not disappoint the hopeful expectations with which they come. Inwardly, such children were longing for reassurance from the one person for whom they had already developed sympathy and love. If this critical moment goes unnoticed, teachers will have to go through the bitter experience of losing their authority and hold over students around the ages of nine to ten. They may well feel tempted, therefore, to prove everything they do, and this dreadful mistake will only make matters worse.

When this view of education has become second nature, one will also find other helpful guidelines. But whatever is presented in class has to cohere; it has to fit together. I have already told you that we allow our young children paint quite freely and naturally, out of their own formative forces—at first not with colored pencils but with liquid colors. Through this, one soon realizes how much children live within the world of colors. After a while, the young student will come gradually to experience something distant—something that draws us away into far distances—as blue. It goes without saying that the teacher must have experienced this quality of blue as well. Yellow and red seem to move toward the beholder. Children can already experience this in a very concrete way during the seventh or eighth year, unless they have been plagued with fixed tasks in drawing or painting. Of course, if you force children to copy houses or trees representationally, this color experience will soon be lost. But if one guides children so they can feel: Wherever I move my hand, there the color follows—then the type of material used is of secondary importance. Or: The color really begins to live under my fingers—it wants to spread a little further. Whenever such feelings can be drawn out in children's souls, one enables them to discover something fundamental and significant—that is, color perspective. A child will feel that the reddening yellow comes towards us, and that mauve-blue takes us further away. This is how one can livingly prepare the ground for something that must be introduced at a later stage—linear perspective; it is very harmful to teach this subject before students have had an intensive experience of color perspective. To teach them quantitative perspective without their first having inwardly absorbed qualitative perspective—which is inherent in the experience of color—has the thoroughly harmful effect of making them superficial.

But there are even further implications. If you prevent children from having an intensive experience of color perspective, they will not develop the necessary incentive while learning to read (always remembering the reservation expressed yesterday, that it is unnecessary to push a child into reading at the earliest possible time). These color experiences will stimulate mobility in the child's mental imagery, suppleness in feelings, and flexibility in the will activities. The child's entire soul life will become more sensitive and pliable. It may well be that, if you use the method of painting-drawing and drawing-painting, the child will not learn to read as quickly. But when the right time comes, reading will not be anchored too loosely, which can happen, nor too tightly, as if each letter were making a kind of a scratch upon the tender soul-substance of the child.

The important thing is that whatever is comprehended through soul and spiritual faculties should find its proper realm within the human being. We should never ask: What is the point of teaching the child to paint, if it will never be used in later life? This represents an entirely superficial view of life because, in reality, a child has every need for just this activity; if one wants to understand the complexity of a child's needs, one just has to know something about the spiritual background of the human being. Just as the expression “You can't understand this” should never be used when talking to children, so also there should never be a skeptical attitude among adults concerning what a child needs or does not need. These needs should be recognized as flowing from the human constitution itself; and if they are, one will respond with the right instinct. One will not worry unduly, either, if a child forgets some of what has already been learned, because knowledge is transmuted into capacities, and these are truly important later in life. Such capacities will not develop if you overload a child with knowledge. It is essential to realize—and actually practice—that one should impress in the student's memory only what is demanded by social life, that there is no purpose in overburdening the student's memory.

This brings us to the question concerning the relationship between the individual and society, national or ethnic background, and humanity as a whole. When addressing this problem, we must try to avoid harming human nature when blending external demands with our educational practice.

A question is asked regarding music lessons given to a seventeen-year-old girl.

RUDOLF STEINER: The essential thing is what Mister Baumann has already presented to us.¹ With the beginning of puberty and during the following years, a certain musical judgment takes the place of a previous feeling for music and of a general musical experience. The faculty of forming musical judgments emerges. This becomes very noticeable through the phenomenon characterized by Mister Baumann—that is, a certain self-observation begins to manifest, a self-observation of the student's own singing and, with it, the possibility of using the voice more consciously, and so on. This has to be cultivated methodically.

At the same time, however, something else becomes noticeable—that is, from this stage on, natural musical memory begins to weaken a little, with the effect that students have to make more effort to remember music. This is something that has to be especially remembered during music lessons. Whereas, before puberty the children's relationship to music was spontaneous and natural, and because of this their musical memory was excellent, some of them now begin to encounter difficulties—not in taking in music, but in remembering it. This needs to be addressed. One must try to go over the same music several times, not by immediate repetition, but intermittently.

Another characteristic sign at this particular stage is that, whereas previously the instrumental and vocal parts of a piece were experienced as a unity, after the sixteenth to seventeenth years they are listened to with clear discrimination. (From a psychological point of view there is a fine and intimate difference between these two ways of listening.) At this age, musical instruments are listened to far more consciously. There is also a greater understanding for the musical qualities of various instruments. Whereas earlier the instrument appeared to join in with the singing, it is now heard as a separate part. Listening and singing become two separate, though parallel, activities.

This new relationship between singing and the appreciation of the part played by musical instruments is characteristic of this new stage, and the methods of teaching must be changed accordingly. What is important is not to introduce any music theory before this age.

Music should be approached directly and any theoretical observations a teacher may wish to make should come from the students' practical experience of it. Gradually it should become possible for pupils of this age to make the transition toward forming musical judgments on a more rational basis.

What Mister Baumann indicated at the end of his contribution is absolutely correct: one can make use of the ways pupils express themselves musically to increase certain aspects of their self-knowledge. For example, in the Waldorf school we let the older students do some modeling, and from the very beginning one can perceive individual characteristics in what they produce. (When you ask children to model something or other, their work will always display distinctly individual features.) But with regard to musical activities, the teacher cannot go into the pupils' more individual characteristics until the age of sixteen or seventeen. Then, to avoid one-sidedness, it is proper to address questions presented by too much attraction toward a particular musical direction. If pupils of that age develop a passion for certain types of music—for example, if they are strongly drawn to Wagner's music (and in our times many young people slide into becoming pure Wagnerians almost automatically)—then the teacher must try to counterbalance their tendency to be too emotionally swept away by music, rather than developing an appreciation of the inner configuration of the music itself. (This in no way implies any criticism of Wagner's music.)

What happens in such a case is that the musical experience slips too easily into the emotional sphere and consequently needs to be lifted again into the realm of consciousness. A musician will notice this even in the quality of a pupil's singing voice. If music is experienced too much in the realm of feeling, the voice will sound differently from that of a young person who listens more to the formation of the tones, and who has a correct understanding of the more structural element in music.

To work toward a balanced musical feeling and understanding is particularly important at this age. Of course, the teacher, who is still the authority, does not yet have an opportunity to work in this way before the student reaches puberty. After puberty, the teacher's authority no longer counts, but the weight of the teacher's musical judgments does. Until puberty, right or wrong is concurrent with what the teacher considers to be right or wrong. After puberty reasons have to be given—musical reasons also. Therefore it is very important to go deeply into the motivation of one's own musical judgments if there is an opportunity for continuing music lessons at this age. The whole night could be spent talking about this theme, if one wished to.

Question: Is there not an element of dishonesty in asking a child a question if one knows the answer?

RUDOLF STEINER: There is something very interesting at the bottom of this question. Usually, if I ask a question it is because I want to find an answer to something I don't know. If I now question a child—knowing the answer—I commit an untruth. However, in teaching there are always imponderables to be reckoned with, and sometimes it becomes necessary to become clear about this point.

To do that, I often use the following example: If, as a teacher, one wants to speak about the question of immortality in a religious and imaginative way, one might choose the following procedure, and say to oneself: Since children cannot yet comprehend conceptual thoughts, I will use an image to convey the idea of the soul's immortality. As the teacher, I am the one who knows, and my students are uninformed. From my knowledge I will create a picture for them and say, “Look at a cocoon. When the time is right it opens, and a beautiful butterfly flies out. And just as the butterfly flies out of the cocoon, so the immortal soul flies out of the body when a human being dies.” This is one way to approach the subject. Fine; but if such is one's attitude, one may find that the chosen image does not make a deep impression in the children at all. This is because the teacher, with all ingenuity, does not believe the truth of this image, which is used only to illustrate the issue of immortality to “uninformed” children.

But there is another possibility as well—that the teacher believes the truth of this picture. Then one's attitude could be: Despite my limited knowledge and wisdom, I am aware of what is real in the world, and I do believe the truth of this image. I know that I did not invent it, but that it was placed in the world through the powers that ordained the world. Through the butterfly creeping from the cocoon, what happens when the immortal human soul leaves the body is represented on a lower level, but in sense-perceptible form. And I can and do believe in this revelation.

Notice the difference: If teachers believe in the truth of their images and the words used to describe them, their inner attitude will communicate itself to the students. Innumerable examples of this can be found. And so, similarly, imponderables play into the interesting question just raised. It's not important that, as the teacher, one has the opinion: I know my subject, the child does not know it; now I will ask my question, pretending that I want to hear the answer to something I do not know. It does make a great difference, after all, whether I ask the child a question, for example, about the Battle of Zabern, and I know the answer but the child does not, or whether I know the answer and the child also knows it. The untruth would be in asking something I already know. But I could also have a different attitude—that is, I am interested in how the child answers the question. I may phrase my question to find out what the child feels and thinks about a particular point. In this case I don't know in advance what the child will say. The child's answer could have many different shades or nuances.

Let's assume that the teacher's ideal attitude—something I have often emphasized in my lectures—is that even the wisest is not beyond the capacity to learn, even from a tiny baby. For, no matter how far one may have advanced in scientific knowledge, a baby's cry can still teach one very much. If this is the ideal, the way a child answers each question will help teachers learn how to teach. If teachers ask questions, it does not imply that they want to hear something from their pupils that they already know, but that they themselves want to learn from the way a child answers. They will then also phrase their questions properly. For example, they may formulate a question like this: What does this mean to you? Even the tone of voice may indicate the teacher's interest in how the child will answer.

It is a fact that much depends on the imponderables that affect what happens between teacher and child. If what is going on in the child's subconscious is known, one will also discover many other things. The whole question of untruth in the teacher is part of this theme also—that is, what we find when teachers stand before their classes teaching from books or written notes. It can certainly be very convenient for them, but such expediency has a very devastating effect on the actual teaching. This is because, in their subconscious, the children are continually forming the judgment: Why should we be made to learn what even teachers do not know? Why are we made to know what they are reading from their books? This is an even greater untruth that enters the classroom than if teachers ask questions. Even when dictating, teachers should avoid doing so from books. If one perceives what is happening in the child, and if the child can feel the teacher's genuine interest in the pupils, and thus not asking questions with false undertones, the whole situation is entirely different. Then teachers can safely ask their questions without fear of introducing an element of untruth into their lessons.

• 1. Paul Baumann (1887–1964) music teacher at the Waldorf School in Stuttgart, Germany.

It has often had to be emphasised here that when the truths of Spiritual Science are put into words it is very easy for them to be misunderstood in some direction. I have spoken to you also of the very varied reasons for this ready misunderstanding of the knowledge and conceptions of Spiritual Science. It must frequently be repeated that naturally it is very easy to find here or there, among those who have had little opportunity for acquiring spiritual depth, that statements concerning Spiritual Science are made on insufficient grounds, and so on. It is also extraordinarily easy when the facts of Spiritual Science are given out to say: “How does so and so know that; where does he get his knowledge?”—when these same people are not even willing to investigate the origin of facts they themselves often advance concerning it and form their judgment entirely in accordance with their own knowledge. It is not difficult to say: “How can he know that? I don't know it” and then to declare in a high and mighty way: “What I do not know no one else knows, others can at best only believe it.” Such a judgement comes about merely because one refuses to go into the sources from which, particularly at the present time, the knowledge Spiritual Science has to be drawn.

Among the misunderstandings arising in this way we may include the belief that Spiritual Science wishes to pronounce sentence, sentence of wholesale extermination, upon all the striving of the age, in so far as this striving proceeds from personalities outside the pale of Spiritual Science. Here too lies mere misunderstanding. Spiritual scientists who seriously and adequately pay heed to present world conditions are very ready to enter into the attitude of mind, the mood of soul, of their contemporaries, and will ask themselves the question: “What is going on in the souls of my seriously minded contemporaries in the direction where we have to look for the improvement of much that both deserves and needs to be improved?” What, however, must above all be borne in mind as a particularly striking fact at present is that just in the case of those who make the most earnest endeavours, there is often a refusal to enter upon concrete knowledge of the spiritual world, recognition of the spiritual world, which can appear to men as a reality and not merely as something to be disclosed through a sum of concepts. Today most men prefer to remain with their experiences altogether in the sense world, and at best they allow that a spiritual world can be disclosed by means of concepts and ideas. They do not want to set out on an investigation where there is any question of penetrating to the spiritual world in actual experience. This aversion to spiritual reality is a characteristic feature of our time; it it is a feature of our time to which attention must be paid particularly by those of us who try to take our stand on the ground of spiritual Science.

By quoting to you from the thoughts of Walther Rathenau, (see Z-269) I have recently shown that the spiritual scientist is indeed able really to appreciate the direction modern thought is taking, within the limits, that is to say, of what is estimable in this thought. But the rejection of the really spiritual that should arise in our time is nevertheless extraordinary. This rejection can be fully experienced when one pays heed to what is being thought. To many people this has appeared as the most shattering feature of the present world situation. For there are men who understand how to estimate all the seriousness of the present time, who have for some time understood how to estimate it. Here too I beg you, my dear friends, not to consider this the superior attitude of a number of anthroposophists; I beg you not to suppose that Anthroposophy as such is claiming to judge the seriousness of the times better than people outside the Anthroposophical Movement. For one could wish that many more inside the Anthroposophical Movement would feel moved by what is so critical in the present state of the world. Within our own ranks today far too many are to be found who in spite of the seriousness of the times have no mind to face up to this seriousness, preferring to be occupied with their own worthy selves instead of being aroused to some interest in the great questions pulsing throughout mankind.

At the outset of our considerations today, I will take an example that may be said to have come my way by chance; if the word is not misunderstood, and there is no need for any misunderstanding. It is an article which, it is true, is out of date today since it was written when the so-called war was still in full swing. Thus the article is not up to date. Also it is not exactly impressive in other ways, for most of the things discussed are treated very one-sidedly. But it comes from a man—and this can be seen from the whole character and way of writing—who is giving his most earnest thought to what should now happen, and what the world has to expect from the events. This article gives a picture of the gradual trend of behaviour on the part of the western powers, the central powers, the eastern powers, during the catastrophe of these last years. Although in a one-sided way, it shows the great dangers from this catastrophe threatening both present and future. The writer has a certain world-outlook. He considers the world not only from the point of view of land frontiers; the world from the point of view of frontiers is also discussed among men today, and if they can satisfy themselves that some particular thing does not happen within their own territory, they make their mind easy. The author of this article has a wider outlook than that of the village pump, he grasps something of world perspective. And in the summing up of his ideas we come to a very remarkable passage. He says; “A fearful destiny beckons to the white races which seems to me an absolute certainty unless a period of the supremacy of great wisdom succeeds that of passion and delusion. For some time we have actually been living in an age very similar to that of the migration of peoples. The tempo has been tremendously increased by the world war. What corresponds to the German races who invaded the civilised lands of olden times from outside, are the rapidly rising lower classes of the people who both in blood and cultural heritage are very different from those who previously held the power. This migration of peoples—it is better to refer to it thus than to call it a war—is good in so far as it necessitates a widening, a widening of the cultural basis and a raising of levels as a whole. But this would be very dangerous were it to come about too rapidly. And this danger will be increased the longer the world war lasts.”

The article is now out of date. The danger has not diminished, but since all his arguments were based on the then existing thirst for war, they are now superannuated. For us here, however, the first part of what I read out must be of special interest—“a fearful destiny beckons to the white races and seems to me an absolute certainty unless a period of the supremacy of great wisdom succeeds that of passion and delusion.” For, as an abstract truth, this is in fact undeniably right. And when anyone expresses the opinion that the only salvation for mankind lies in turning to a supreme science of wisdom and not to any other political or social quackery, we must give recognition to such a fact, such a tendency of thought. At the same time, however, we may not forget that just those men who, it must be admitted, are deeply moved by the earnestness of the times, when it comes to saying: In what do these wise ideas consist that are to succeed the old deluded ideas? It is just such men who immediately fall back on any kind of deluded ideas that have become mere fine words. That is the tragedy, the fearful destiny, of our time, that men indeed became alive to the fact that it is necessary to turn to the spirit, and are then overcome by fear and anxiety when they should turn to it. Then they are at once ready, once more to seize upon the old delusive ideas which have driven mankind to the present fearful destiny. My dear friends, we need only take this example of a widespread tendency in ideas. Were you to ask a law abiding upholder of the Roman Catholic Church whether he was inclined to the belief that the old conceptions have brought us to this time of catastrophe and that they must be got rid of, do you think that he would really be disposed to recognise the necessity for reshaping the ideas that were unable to save men from this dreadful catastrophe? No! He would say that were men to turn again in the right way to Roman Catholicism they would at once became happy. And the reflection would not even enter his head that they have had 1900 years in which to practise their Roman Catholicism and yet have fallen into the catastrophe, that the least we must learn from the catastrophe is the need for a fresh impulse. This is only one example among many. Particularly where this point is concerned it is above all necessary frankly to focus attention on existing conditions.

You see today even for a recognised member of some church or other it is easy to say that Haeckelism or materialism is devil's work and must be rooted out lock, stock and barrel. This is the reverse of what is able to lead men to a sound attitude of soul. Yes, my dear friends, it is very easy to speak thus but when it stops there and no investigation is made into the conditions in question, it is impossible to arrive at any sound solution for the present time, much less for the near future. For if you take any world outlook materialist in feeling and ask yourself: where does it come from historically? If you really wish to get to the root of this, in the end you will be unable to help saying that fundamentally it comes from the way in which Christianity has been preached during these 1900 years by the various Christian churches. Those whose insight goes deeper know that Haeckel's doctrine would have been impossible without the preceding Christianity of the churches. There are people who have remained at the standpoint of the church, as it was, let us say, in the Middle Ages; they continue to uphold the ideas professed by the church in medieaval times. Others have developed these ideas. And among those who have developed them is, for instance, Ernst Haeckel. He is a true child of the conceptions fostered through the centuries by the various churches. This has not arisen outside the church; in the fullest sense it has originated entirely within the teachings of the church itself. Certainly the connections of these things will only be recognised aright if one is endowed by Spiritual Science with a little insight to give one clear vision.

Today, therefore, I want to dwell on one particular point, though some of you may say it is too difficult, but nothing ought to be too difficult for us and we are meant to gain insight.

Now look—if today you read philosophically inspired writings of well-educated learned Catholic men you will find, in all passages where a certain point comes into question, a quite definite outlook developed; and it may be said that you find this outlook developed try the very best of these scholarly Catholics. In passing I should like to point out that I am not at all in the habit of undervaluing the literary training of the Catholic clergy for example. I quite realise (and I have spoken of this in my book Vom Menschenrätsel) the superior schooling shown in the philosophical writings of many Catholic theologians, compared with the writings of those men of philosophical learning who have not made a study of Catholic theology. In this respect one must own that the literature, the theological literature, of protestant learning, of the reformed churches, lags far behind the excellent philosophical training of Catholic theologians. Through their strict schooling these people possess a certain ability to form their concepts really plastically. They have what the famous men of non-Catholic philosophical literature, for instance, have no notion of, that is, a particular faculty of seeing into the nature of a concept, the nature of an idea, and so on. To put it briefly, these people are scholarly. One need not even take one of Haeckel's books, one can take one of Eucken's, to confirm this playing about with concepts, this dreadful treatment of the most important concepts, a treatment merely on the level of a cheap novelette! Or, to give another example, we might take one of Bergson's books that always promote the feeling that he is catching hold of concepts but is unable regally to come to grips with them—like the famous Chinaman who wanting to turn round always catches hold of his pigtail. This absolute confusion in the world of concepts, shown by the people who lack training is never to be found when you come to the philosophical literature of the Catholic Clerics. Thus, for example, in this connection, a book like the three volume History of Idealism by Otto Willmann, a thorough going Catholic who makes his Catholicism evident on every opportunity, takes a much higher place than most of what is written in the realm of philosophy on the non-Catholic side. All this may be quite well recognised while still taking the standpoint that must be taken in Spiritual Science. An inferior spirit may decide differently in this matter, may perhaps be of the opinion that because good schooling is shown, the whole thing is of more value.

In this polished Catholic philosophical literature one point will always confront you, a point that has an extraordinary way of hoodwinking the modern thinker. It is the point that always comes into evidence when there is question of the difference between man and animal. I think you will agree that the ordinary readers of Haeckel, the ordinary upholders of Haeckel, always proceed to minimise the difference between man and animal as much as possible, to arouse as much belief as they can that men as a whole is only to a certain extent a more highly developed animal. This is not done by the Catholic men of learning but they always bring forward something that appears to them as a radical difference between animal and man. They raise the point that the animal gets no further than the ordinary conception it acquires of an object by first smelling it, of another object by smelling that or inspecting it, and so on; that the animal always stops at mere detailed, unindividual ideas, whereas man has the capacity for forming deduced abstract concepts and of summing things up. This is indeed a fundamental difference, for when the matter is grasped in this way man is really definitely distinguished from the animals. The animal noticing only details cannot develop what is spiritual; abstract concepts must live in the spiritual. For this reason one has to recognise that in man there lives a soul specially adapted for forming abstract concepts; whereas the animal with its particular kind of inner life has no power of forming these abstract concepts.

Whoever an this point keeps in mind the corresponding Catholic statements will say to himself: Here is something tremendously significant, that through good philosophical training on this decisive, fundamentally decisive, point, the distinction can be shown between man and animal. Modern men do not in the least appreciate the significance of such a matter. When, for instance, the uproar was set going for which Drews was responsible, namely, the discussion whether Jesus ever lived, when at that time a great gathering took place in Berlin about the problem “Did Jesus ever Live?” the Catholic theologian Wasmann¹ also spoke. Naturally he could only say things that the others considered very reactionary. But in spite of the fact that speeches were made at the time by the shining lights of protestant theology in Berlin strictly speaking in those speeches only two utterances, and what supported them, seemed to me really on a better level, not on a present-day level but on a rather higher level. One was an exposition launched by—now I do not wish to say anything derogatory, I am actually praising the man—a learned idler of the first water. (I don't think I can praise him more than by calling him a learned idler of the first water.) Through his intellectuality and the special information he possessed on the most varied subjects, through his great knowledge, the man might have been able to do a great deal. But when I had something to do with him—eighteen, nineteen years ago for fifteen years he had been writing a Revision of Logics and I think he must have been writing it ever since, for in the meantime I have never come across this Revision of Logic. At that time he said something that is quite correct—at the present time men actually become quite frightening when they begin to think—that is they were quite frightening then. One need listen to only two or three propositions, either in a scientific or non-scientific talk, and immediately the most terrible lack of logic can be observed. What (said he) men must observe so that they do not arrive at the most horrible delusive conceptions usual nowadays, can be written on a quarto sheet (so he thought); it is only necessary to take note of this quarto sheet. I am sure I do not know if he will present this quarto sheet as his Revision of Logic! As I said, this Revision of Logic had then gone on for fifteen years since when eighteen, nineteen years have passed; I do not know how for it has got by now. But I want to give him a word of praise by calling him a witty, intelligent do-nothing, because I mean by this that were he not a witty do-nothing ha could do tremendously much. At that time he said something very fine: The Catholic Church one day had to hear that the comets which consist of nucleus and tail are heavenly bodies like the others and move in accordance with laws like other heavenly bodies. As in face of existing facts it could no longer be denied that comets are also heavenly bodies, the Catholic Church decided to allow that the laws of celestial space should also be applied to comets; but they first gave way only where the nucleus was concerned and not the tail. Now in this he was wanting to express merely symbolically that as a rule the Catholic Church is prone only to yield to absolute necessity just as it was not until 1827 that it allowed its adherents to recognise the Copernican world-outlook. But when the Church had to give way to what was most necessary it did at least hold back the tail in the matter! This is an observation which I found highly descriptive of the situation.

The other observation, however, was made by the investigator of ants, the Catholic Wasmann, who not only does excellent work with ants but is a well-trained philosopher as well. He said: “Really gentleman you can not understand me in the least for none of you knows in reality how to think in terms of philosophy. No one who thinks philosophically talks as you do!” And in point of fact he was quite right. There is no doubt that he hit the nail on the heed. Now there is a neat little publication by Wasmann concerning the difference between man and animal which puts forward in clear outlines what I have just now indicated, that is, man's faculty to think really in abstract concepts, a faculty which the animal certainly is not supposed to possess. This is something extraordinarily deceptive, my dear friends, for in a certain way it is convincing for anyone who has schooled his thinking to the point of being able to grasp the whole bearing of such an assertion.

But now let us look at the matter from the point of view of Spiritual Science, there the whole affair will meet you in its true meaning. For you see when we start from Spiritual Science, from the conceptions and experiences in connection with it which can be acquired in the spiritual world, we see, on the one side that without the considerations of Spiritual Science we may arrive at the delusive statement or which I have just spoken, and that it must actually hold good for anyone who will not become a spiritual scientist just because he has had a good training in philosophy. This is seen on the one hand. On the other hand one sees the following—sees it simply by observing things in the world—that when with the hypotheses of Spiritual Science man and animal are compared, it becomes apparent that man confronts the objects in the world in a series of single observations afterwards forming abstract concepts by all manner of thought processes in which he reunites what he has seen as separate entities. It may also be admitted that the animal does not possess this kind of abstraction, it does not practise this activity of abstraction. The curious thing is, however, that the abstract concept is not lacking in the animal, that, in its soul the animal is actually living in the most abstract concepts which we men only form with much difficulty, and that the animal does not see things separately as we do. Where we excel is just in our freer use of the senses and in a quite definite kind of co-operation between senses and inner emotions and will-impulses. We have that advantage over the animal. The sureness of instinct possessed by animals rests on the very fact that the animal from the start lives with those abstract concepts that we have first to form. We differ from animals in the emancipation of our senses and in their freer use where the outer world is concerned, also in being able to pour will into our senses which the animal is unable to do. What we men do not have but must first acquire, namely, the abstract concept, is just what the animal does have, strange as it may seem. It is true every animal has only a limited sphere but in this sphere it has this kind of concept, however odd this appears. Man's attention is directed to one dog, two, three dogs, and he then forms the abstract concept “dog”. The animal in this sphere has the same abstract concept “dog” that me have, it has the quite exact concept without needing to form it. We have first to form it which the animal has no need to do. The animal, however, has no capacity for distinguishing with precision one dog from another or for giving it any precise individuality through sense-perception.

Thus you see, my dear friends, if we do not acquire the faculty for going into the real facts through Spiritual Science, we deceive ourselves in a certain respect concerning what is most essential. We believe because men must develop the capacity to form abstract concepts that through such concepts we are to be differentiated from animals who do not possess this capacity. But the animal has no need of the capacity, since it has abstract concepts to start with. The animal has an entirely different kind of sense-perception from that of man. It is just the outer sense-perception that is quite different.

In this connection a most profound change in human conceptions is needed. For men have informed themselves about all kinds of scientific concepts that have become popular today. Wither they have learnt them in some school through direct tuition or they have received the information from any doubtful source: what I am referring to is those newspaper articles that circulate scientific conceptions throughout the world. Men are under the domination of these scientific conceptions. Where what I have been referring to is concerned, men are absolutely dominated by what I might call an instinctive bias towards the belief that animals really see their environment in the same way as men do. When a man takes his dog for a walk he instinctively believes that the dog is seeing the world in the same way as he does himself, that the dog is seeing the grass, the wheat, the stone in the same colours as he does. He also thinks—if he can think at all—that he can deal in abstractions and therefore has abstract concepts which, however, the dog doesn't have; and so on. Yet it is not so. This dog running beside us is living just as much in abstract concepts as we are. In fact he is living in them with greater intensity. And he has no need to acquire them, for from the start he is living in them to a high degree. It is not the same however, with external perception; which gives him quite a different picture. You need only be attentive to certain things that can be observed in life. These are certainly not always taken sufficiently in earnest. I could give you quite a number of examples to show you in this direction how men from pure instinct think upside down. For instance I was once going down a street in Zurich, I think it was, after a lecture held at the evening meeting of one of our Groups. A coachman was waiting there whose horse refused to answer to the rein and showed signs of shying. The coachman said it was afraid of its own shadow. He of course saw the horse's shadow thrown on the wall by his lamps and supposed that the horse saw the shadow just as he did. Naturally he had no inkling of what was going on in—can I say—the horse's soul, nor what was going on in his own soul. He sees the horse's shadow but the horse has a vivid sense of being in that bit of space in the etheric body where the shadow is formed. This is a quite different process of inner perception—a very different process. You see, you have here the collision between the old way of thinking back to the most elementary, the most instinctive perception of naive men, and what must come into men through the new Spiritual Science. It is true you will first seriously have to take stock of what lies at the root of this. For with regard to such things the crass materialism of a Vogt or Moleschott, a Clifford or Spencer, and so on, differs far less from the handed down creeds of individual religions than does the new way at thought underlying Spiritual Science. Today certain materialists actually think that there is not much difference between man and animal. They may same time have also heard it ring out (even if the bells were not ringing together) that man can form abstract concepts which nevertheless are different from the usual conceptions of the senses. But they say to themselves: Abstract concepts! Perhaps those are nothing very important, nothing very essential; fundamentally men do not differ from animals. Modern materialism as a whole is actually the creation of Church creeds. This must be faced in all seriousness and it will then be seen that it is a question of a fresh kind of conception for the soul of man if we are not to prefer going back to the old conceptions with the idea that all will then soon go well!

But can we say that men are able simply to forbear from turning to the real life of the spirit and at the same time go on? No those are quite right who says “a fearful destiny is beckoning to the white man which seems to me absolutely certain unless a period of the supreme rule of wisdom succeeds that of passion and illusion.” People should recognise, however, that the greater part of the scientific conceptions throughout the world today fall under the category of illusion. This should be thoroughly understood. In their stream of development men have come to the point which we have often described by saying that, since the fifteenth century, mankind has been in the epoch of the consciousness soul. And this development of the consciousness soul takes place in the way I have often described. Let us look at very important characteristic in the development of the consciousness soul.

Last time indeed I pointed out to you that everything perceived by the spiritual investigator, that is to say, everything lying in mankind's development which is raised by him into consciousness, even when not recognised, goes on in man's subconscious. Men go through certain experiences while developing towards the future. They go through these experiences unconsciously When the do not draw them up, bring them into consciousness, as they are meant to do in this epoch of the development of the consciousness soul. But it is just in this epoch that much that would rise in man's subconscious is thrust back again.

Among other things there comes to man in an ever greater degree a certain part of that experience which may be called “the meeting with the Guardian of the Threshold”. Undoubtedly, my dear friends, if men with to enter the spiritual world in full consciousness, to develop Imagination, Inspiration, Intuition, they must enter the sphere of the supersensible world with fuller experiences, with quite different experiences. It might be said they must pass the Guardian of the Threshold with greater thoroughness than the whole mass of mankind are obliged to do in the course of this epoch of the consciousness-soul. Up to a certain degree, however, by the end of the development of the consciousness-soul man must in some measure have passed the Guardian of the Threshold. He can let this happen the easy way by passing in a state of unconsciousness. But Spiritual Science is there to prevent this happening. It has to draw attention to what is now taking place in the evolution of mankind. Whoever holds people back from Spiritual Science is doing no less than forcing them not consciously but unconsciously to approach the Guardian of the Threshold who appears on mankind's horizon in this particular epoch.

To put it differently. From about 1413, for the 2160 years that the epoch of the consciousness soul lasts, mankind in one incarnation or another will have to pass the Guardian of the Threshold and, if only partly, go through what can be experienced in connection with the Guardian. Man can be forced by materially minded men to pass by unconsciously or he can in freedom make the resolve to listen to Spiritual Science and thus experience something in passing the Guardian of the Threshold, either through his own vision or through sound human understanding. And in thus going by the Guardian of the Threshold something will be experienced that enables men to form correct, pertinent conceptions about the concrete supersensible world—above all conceptions enabling them to direct this conceiving, this thinking, in a certain free, unprejudiced direction conducive to reality.

To make thinking in accordance with reality so that it can actually enter into the impulses lying in events and does not live merely in abstractions like modern science, which has knowledge only of external processes—I have often described this as the greatest achievement of Spiritual Science. To know certain things about the spiritual world is becoming a necessity for men. And through this they must be able to judge their position in the world from the point of view of a spiritual horizon, whereas their judgment now has only a physical horizon. You are already judging something in a new and right way when, for instance, you bring the thoughts to fruition in you that animals do not lack abstract ideas but actually live in those that are very abstract, and again, that man is differentiated from the animal by the development of his senses which are freed from the narrow connection with life in the body. It is only through this that one arrives at suitable conceptions concerning the difference between man and animal. This is outwardly expressed by the organisation of the senses in animals standing in a very pronounced relation to the whole life and organisation of the body. The bodily organisation in the animal extends very considerably into the senses.

Let us consider the eye. It is quite well known to natural scientists that the eyes of lower animals have in them organs filled with blood (take as example, the habellifom and ensiform processes) which in a living way establish a relation between the inner eye and the entire organisation: whereas the human eye has no such organisation, being much more independent. This growth of independence in the senses, this emancipation of the senses from the organisation as a whole, is something that only arises in the human being. For this reason, however, the whole world of the senses is much more in connection with the will in man than in the animal. I once expressed this morphologically in a different way drawing your attention to the same fact from a different point of view, as follows. If we take the threefold organism, the organs of the extremities, breast, head, and if I draw it as a diagram, in the animal this is the head organism, this the breast organism and this the organism of the extremities (see diagram). The head is immediately above the earth, the earth is under the head organism in all animals, approximately of course, according to the nature of the being. The spine is above the earth's axis or the radius of the earth.

In man his head stands on his own breast organism and extremities organism. In man the breast organism is under the head organism, as in the primal the earth is under the head organism; man stands with his heed on his own earth. In the animal there is a separation between the will-organism that is, the extremities organism, the rear extremities, and the head. In man the will, the will-organism, is inserted directly into the head and the whole into the radius of the earth. For this reason the senses are, as it were, flooded by the will and this is characteristic of man; thus he is in reality distinct from the animal because his senses are flooded by the will. It is not the will but a deeper element that flows through the senses in the case of the animal; thus there is a more intimate connection between the organisation of the senses and the organism as a whole. Man lives far more in the outer world, animals live far more in their own private world. Man in his use of the tools of his senses liven much more in the external world.

Now consider, my dear friends! We are at present living in the age of the consciousness soul; and what does this mean? It means, as I have shown you several times, that we are pressing towards a time when consciousness will become a mere reflection, when only reflected images will be present in consciousness; for the age of the consciousness soul is also the age of intellectuality. (see Lecture IV) And in this intellectual age man actually first arrives at developing his faculty for abstraction to an absolute art. In this age of intellectualism and materialism the most abstract concepts are formed.

Now we may think of two people; one a well trained philosopher, as well trained as Catholic theologians are. Holding his particular views this man ought to say what he will not sir recognising the dilemma in which we find ourselves because centuries of Christianity have brought about materialism; this he finds unpleasant. He must, however, actually Bays man in the age of the consciousness soul can best form abstract concepts, and in this way has raised himself as far as possible above the animal.

But the spiritual scientist may also come along and sort what is characteristic of man in this age of the development of the consciousness soul is his particularly strong faculty for being able to form abstract concepts. Where does this take him? It actually takes him back into the animal kingdom. And this explains a very great deal. It also explains to you how the fact of man being prone to get as near animals as he can, arises just because he there meets the abstraction of the concept. Moreover it makes clear to you something else that arises frequently today in the carrying on and conduct of life. Science will become increasingly abstract and man in his social life will increasingly wish to live like beasts of the field, simply attending to his most ordinary needs, hunger and so forth. The spiritual scientist shows up the inner connection between the faculty for abstraction and the animal nature. At all events man roes through the experience of this inner connection in the age of the consciousness soul. If he is hindered in the way already described, he goes through the experience unconsciously. Innumerable human beings go through What the depths of their soul tells them: you are becoming more and more like an animal and just by going forward you will become ever more so. Man will have this fright on his path of progress. It is this too that causes men to keep so willingly to the old conservative concepts.

Should this be? And should this unconscious appearance of animal nature hold man back from going forward when he comes to the Guardian of the Threshold? No, this should not happen—but something else has to take place. By going beck during his apparent progress, this backsliding of of man's must so happen that it is not simply a matter of going forward and then back (as it certainly would be were man to develop only a faculty for abstraction), for then man would come back to the earlier stages of his development, he would return altogether to the animal. No, there must be a going backward, but like this (see diagram); an advance must take place, a going upward that must lead into the spiritual.

What we lose by entering into abstractions we must deprive of power by filling our abstract reflected images with the spiritual, by taking up the spiritual into our abstractions. By that we go forward. Man, in front of the Guardian of the Threshold is consciously or unconsciously faced with the formidable decision either through abstract concepts to become more animal than the animal and, to quote Goethe's Faust ‘rub his nose in any filth’; or, on the other hand, the moment he enters abstraction to pour into his abstract concepts what streams out of the spiritual world in the way we have described during these last days. (see Z-269) Then man will begin to estimate rightly his place in the world, for then he understands how he is caught up in evolution. Then he knows why in a Certain point of this evolution—just through abstractions, the danger threatens him of sinking back to the animal. When man in primitive culture epochs stood at the animal stage He was distinguished from the animal not by his abstract concepts but by his senses. The animal had better abstract concepts. It is only now that man can develop abstract concepts at need, animals have much better ones. Once I gave another example of this when I said: How long ago in evolution is it since man tried to make paper? The wasp has been able to do it in building its nest, for millions of years! And just look at what comes to light through animals in the way of active, effective understanding, in wisdom, intellectuality and the faculty for abstraction, even though it appears one-sidedly in the various animals! Men foolishly call this instinct; but when you look into the matter, my dear friends, you will know that there are very few men indeed today who with all their faculty for abstraction come so far with this faculty that they get beyond the one sidedness of the present animal types.

Thus man is placed before this important decision, either to return to the animal condition, in a very great measure to be “more animal than any animal” to use Mephistopheles' expression from Faust—Ahriman Mephistopheles would like to attain this in man—or he must accept the spiritual. (See Lecture V.)

A certain intensity of conception is indeed necessary if man wishes to know what is indicated for him in the progress of time, in the necessities brought about by time. Here man must go deep into world-evolution. And he must not shrink from preparing himself through the concepts of Spiritual Science for the more difficult concepts, the concepts bearing reality. For it is natural, when for the first time anyone hears the kind of things I have been saying today, for him to say: This is pure madness!—That is quite easy to understand. But, my dear friends, we can also imagine that some one may regard very much of whet has been done for years by the clever as pure madness, and accordingly hold the great majority to be mad. But then he would be able to understand why this great majority should take him—an exception—for a madman. For in a company of madmen it is not themselves they hold to be mad but the clever people.

By reason of this, man learns however to make his whole perception of the world fruitful. He learns to make fruitful just what in reality has always distinguished him from the animal. Strictly speaking man is thoroughly unobservant about his own faculties, and he will become so increasingly if he develops only intellectuality in the age of the consciousness soul. If we go back to earlier ages we frequently find among talented men that they still had a certain sense also for their surroundings. If we take the conceptions that these men of old formed about certain animals, for example, these are often full of good sense. The conceptions in modern books on Zoology from the standpoint of abstractions are often quite honest and worthy of recognition, but full of sense, my dear friends, they certainly are not. I should like to ask you, in the first place, whether among the conceptions given out today in schools there are really any capable of leading you into the actual life of the animals? Moreover do not men today notice the timid gaze with which whole herds, whole groups of animals look out into the world—the timid, intimidated gaze? O, we shall learn to see it again when through our faculty of abstraction we have been driven to the Guardian of the Threshold, and are able once more to have sympathy with the animal—not the sympathy often produced artificially but a sympathy corresponding to to an elementary inner experience. It can be said that a peculiar intimidation, as it were, a timid outlook upon the world, is widespread among all the higher animals, all the warm-blooded animals. I was walking once with a university man and at a certain place on our way we saw deer, stags, scampering away from anything and everything. This man said to me: “Something must be the reason for this; formerly men must have tormented animals, shooting them and so on, so that the animal souls have become accustomed to fear men.” But there are other things besides men that animals fear.

Thus people look for the reason why certain animals are afraid. There is no need to look for the reason, my dear friends. Fear is, of course, a quite general universal characteristic of animals. When animals are not afraid it is just because they have been trained and given different habits in some particular way. Fear is innate in the animal because the animal has in a high degree the faculty for abstraction, for abstract concepts, and lives in them. For you must realise that the world you acquire after long study, when you have learned to live in the abstract—this is the world in which the animal lives. And the world here in which man lives in his senses is for the animals, in spite of animals possessing senses, for them far more unknown than for man—and man himself has fear of the unknown. This is thoroughly in accordance with deep truth, The animal gases into the world with timidity; this has definite import. Recently I have spoken of it in an article on “The Ahrimanic and Luciferic in the Life of Man” in the recent number of the publication “Das Reich”: men are afraid in face of spiritual life; how is it that they become so afraid? It comes about by their having at the present time to meet the Guardian of the Threshold in the subconscious. There they come to the decision of which I have spoken; there they approach the animal. The animal is afraid, the animals are going through the region of fear. The connection is thus. And the condition of fear will increase more and more if men do not take serious pains really to learn about, really to take to themselves, the world they have to meet—the spiritual world.

There are only quite a few men in these days into whom something of former atavistic conceptions of world reality have penetrated through the general illusive conceptions. When the animal is observed in its whole connection with the development of nature, when its organisation is looked at in relation to the ordering of nature, what exactly is the animal? You see when the old Moon evolution was in existence, in regard to outer organisation there was still no differentiation between the higher animals and man of today. The differentiation is a product of earth evolution only. Man has gone through the normal evolution of the earth, but the animal has not; the animal dried up, as it were, during the Moon evolution. Its organisation does not fit in with earth evolution, whoever has seen into this—in modern times a few people, Hegel among them, have instinctively seen into this—whoever has done so can answer the question: what exactly is the animal in the form of its organisation? Nature becomes sick and the sickness of nature is the animal, especially the higher animal. In the animal organisation there holds sway the sickness of nature, the sickness of the whole earth. This development of disease in the earth, this unhealthy falling back into the old Moon evolution, is the higher animal nature, not so much the lower animals but those that are higher. But this also is something that, in the decisive moment of passing the Guardian of the Threshold, man meets unconsciously unless he wills to do so consciously.

And if you compare what I have just been saying with the different ways in which the American West, the European centre, and the East meet the Guardian of the Threshold of which I spoke in lectures some time ago, (see R. XLVII) if you compare these you will see how it is possible to get one's bearings where what is happening to mankind on earth is concerned, if only one will go right into these things. Then it will be grasped that in admitting these conceptions man would really arrive finally at thinking differently about himself and his relation to his fellows. Today all serious people should at some time consider the question that can arise in such a sentence as the one referred to: “It seems to me a certainty that a fearful destiny beckons to the white races unless a period of the supreme dominion of wisdom succeeds that of passion and delusive conceptions.” Where these wise conceptions are to be found, how they are to be obtained—these questions Spiritual Science is quite ready to answer (see R. 40)—And Spiritual Science, my deer friends, would like to give the answer to the most important questions of the day. And when anyone comes who feels as deeply as this man what is necessary for the times, he may be told: If you wish no longer to be afraid that a fearful destiny is beckoning to white men, then begin to observe the world and its phenomena in the way of Spiritual Science!

• 1. Erich Wasmann, born 1859 in Meran, became a Jesuit and late a priest. He investigated the life of Ants and among other works wrote The Souls of Men and Animism 1904.